[Pharo-dev] [Vm-dev] Simulator in Pharo 3

[Eliot Miranda]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 6:19 AM, <btc at openinworld.com> wrote:

> phil at highoctane.be wrote:
>
>> Ron,
>>
>> Sure but at this time, not being able to run the simulator in a full
>> Pharo environment is a severe issue.
>>
>> The key advantage is that the Smalltalk VM is written in itself.
>>
>> Now, what do I experience is that it is hard to embark on VM work.
>>
>> Why? Even if the PharoVMBuilders help in generating and compiling the VM
>> for several platforms (I can build for Windows 8.1, OSX, iOS, Debian 7 etc)
>> this is only one part of the puzzle.
>>
>> The next step, is to understand how things do work for real, the
>> interpret() C loop isn't gonna help me one bit, I need to be able to
>> simulate this one in a Simulator. And I want to do that on the Pharo
>> platform. Currently on 2.0 - this will (again) be fun to get to work on 3.0.
>>
>> I am not in the league of the VM maintainers obviously.
>>
>> But Clement provided me with Eliot's Cog Simulation image, which works
>> for his own work. But only his own. We do not have something like a
>> Configuration to get the same thing. And that's a very acute pain. There
>> are only so many hours in a day, true. So, in order to bring in more
>> people/resources for the VM work, the barrier to entry should be moved a
>> tad down.
>>
>> We tried to have the StackSimulator working for a while (Stephan I'll
>> definitely get your version, thanks for it). This is also because
>> InterpreterSimulator doesn't work anymore and we have to use the
>> StackInterpreter instead (which is complicated already vs pure interpreter).
>>
>> All of this rant to say that having a clean interpreter and a basic image
>> (Maybe PharoKernel/Hazelnut/Boostrapping/Spoon will give us a very
>> simple image to simulate - the whole image isn't really needed. Hopefully
>> Oz will also move us forward on that front).
>>
>> A real Pharo image is overkill for this as a ton of plugins get involved
>> etc.
>>
>> The core system should be the same for Pharo/Squeak/... :
>>
>> VMMaker-MemoryManager
>> VMMaker-Interpreter
>> VMMaker-InterpreterSimulation
>> VMMaker-MemoryManagerSimulation
>>
>> and of course the Slang things (VMMaker-Support and VMMaker-Translation
>> to C).
>>
>> What I'd love to end up with is an embeddable VM that we could hook into
>> other environments, languages etc (a bit like TCL for example). This
>> requires work on how the VM core runs. And to explore this, simulation is
>> needed.
>>
>> Sorry for the long post. I wish I was a millionaire to pour in some cash
>> into the project to speed some areas up. Working on it :-) Maybe should we
>> work in that direction for funding. http://www.gv.com/ where are you?
>>
>> Phil
>>
>>  Getting the simulator working in Pharo could be a GSoC project? or is it
> too advanced?
>

If you guys would read and contribute to vm-dev you'd already know that
someone with no VM experience (tty) just implemented event processing for
the simulator window.  The simulator only supported the old polling event
architecture.  So no it's not too advanced.  But more importantly why
aren't you all discussing vm stuff on the vm forum?


> cheers -ben
>
-- 
best,
Eliot
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