[Vm-dev] Re: Dalvik vs. ART: Android virtual machines and the battle for better performance | Pocketnow

[Casey Ransberger]

Isn't the Objective-C runtime a kind of VM? It might not be byte code
based, but it does lots of other things that we need VMs for generally,
like dynamic dispatch and such.

I realize the machinery is different, but if it walks like a duck…

Seems like the linked paper is another example of the "use the most popular
VM" strategy, rather than an argument that "VMs are dead" to me. Feel free
to fire back if I'm completely and dead wrong, but it just doesn't seem
that different from Smalltalk on the JVM, etc…

Casey


On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 12:04 AM, Clément Bera <bera.clement at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> 2013/12/13 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 1:07 PM, askoh <askoh at askoh.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I am not a VM guy. But, is the Smalltalk in a C World article compiling
>>> Smalltalk to machine code to run without the VM?
>>> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dc552/papers/SmalltalkInACWorld.pdf
>>>
>>> He talks about the VM being a relic of the past. Is that true?
>>>
>>
>> Is the Java VM a relic of the past?  Given portable devices is compiled
>> code a relic of the past?  Is a safe development environment with fast
>> compile times a thing of the past?  Their own conclusions imply that the
>> answer is not yet:
>>
>
> What do you mean by not yet ? Do you think that in a 10 or 20 years VMs
> will be obsolete ?
>
> There's 1 detail I am not sure. By JIT in this article (
> http://m.pocketnow.com/2013/11/13/dalvik-vs-art), does he mean the
> bytecode to native code generator only or the native code generator +
> inline cache management + adaptive recompiler.
>
> I'm wondering, even if they have their code stored as native code instead
> of byte code, do they have some kind of native code generator for adaptive
> recompilation to reach such a performance ?
>
> And how do they manage their inline caches ? As all methods are native,
> some monomorphic inline caches could be promoted to PIC due to 1 very rare
> case and then as they always keep the same n-code this send site would be
> slower forever. Does this mean they would need to empty inline caches
> sometimes ?
>
>
>> "Our current approach lacks some of the advantages of Smalltalk. The most
>> obvious of these is debugging. Our current implementation emits very sparse
>> DWARF debugging information and so is fairly limited in terms of debugging
>> support even in comparison to C, and therefore a long way behind the state
>> of the art for Smalltalk circa 1980. This is currently the focus of ongoing
>> work. Once this is done, then implementing things like thisContext making
>> use of debug metadata become possible. In our current implementation,
>> run-time introspection is only available for objects and variables bound to
>> blocks, not for activation records.
>>
>> Closely related is the rest of the IDE. In traditional Smalltalk
>> implementations, the IDE is closely integrated with the execution
>> environment. GNU Smalltalk is the major exception, and provides a model
>> close to ours. Building a good IDE and debugger is beyond the scope of the
>> LanguageKit project, but building these tools on top of LanguageKit is a
>> goal of E ́toile ́."
>>
>>
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>> Aik-Siong Koh
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> View this message in context:
>>> http://forum.world.st/Dalvik-vs-ART-Android-virtual-machines-and-the-battle-for-better-performance-Pocketnow-tp4729727p4729982.html
>>> Sent from the Squeak VM mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> best,
>> Eliot
>>
>>
>
>
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