[Vm-dev] Re: [Pharo-dev] Parsing Pharo syntax to C/C++

[Alain Rastoul]

Le 15/09/2014 18:23, Eliot Miranda a écrit :

> I find this whole discussion depressing.  It seems people would rather
> put their energy in chasing quick fixes or other technologies instead of
> contributing to the work that is being done in the existing VM.  People
> discuss using LLVM as if the code generation capabilities inside Cog
> were somehow poor or have no chance of competing.  Spur is around twice
> as fast as the current memory manager, has much better support for the
> FFI.  Clément and I, now with help from Ronie, are making excellent
> progress towards an adaptive optimizer/speculative inliner that will
> give us similar performance to V8 (the Google JavaScript VM, lead by
> Lars Bak, who implemented the HotSpot VM (Smalltalk and Java)) et al.
>   We are trying to get person-power for a high-quality FFI and have a
> prototype for a non-blocking VM.  When we succeed C won't be any better
> and so it won't be an interesting target.  One will be able to program
> entirely in Smalltalk and get excellent performance.  But we need
> effort.  Collaboration.

Hi Eliot,

Not everybody has the necessary skills to help and contribute to your 
work, my assembly skills are really faraway and outdated now (... little 
frustration here :( ... )
but imho your work is unvaluable to pharo and smalltalk community
- just to mention it, I noticed a 30 to 50% gain in a small bench I 
wrote for fun recently (a very dumb chess pawn moves generator) with the 
last Spur vm
I was shocked :)
64bits + x2 perfs + non blocking (or multi threaded?) vm are giant steps 
forward
that makes it possible for pharo smalltalk to compete with mainstream 
technologies

Regards,

Alain