[Vm-dev] Old Things

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Sat Jan 20 01:53:00 UTC 2018


Hi Stuart,

   let me take a tilt at this too, to answer the Exupery and Spoon related
questions.

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 5:21 PM, Stuart Cassoff <aa72 at bell.net> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> As I mentioned before I'm learning, and learning something old involves
> some wading through history.
> I continue to encounter old things, old advice, dead links, etc.
> This isn't a complaint - just a fact of dealing with old things.
> I'm getting there, but it takes a little time (I've at least watched all
> the important Alan Kay vids!).
>
> I believe these statements are correct, please let me know otherwise:
>
> - People were enthusiastic about Exupery ten years ago but it's dead now.
>

Exupery  was made obsolete by the Cog JIT which arrived in 2008 thanks to
Qwaq (then Teleplace and now Terf).
Since the original Cog speed has increased slowly but steadily, notably
with the introduction of a better JIT in 2012 and in 2016 with Spur, which
is a new memory manager and object representation for Cog that produces a
significant (-40%) speedup and provides much faster become.

Starting in 2012 Clément Bera and I have been working on a system called
Sista (Speculative Inlining Small*t*alk Architecture) whose in-image
adaptive optimizer/speculative inliner is called Scorch.  Clément is
currently working on its release in Pharo and I hope to do a port to Squeak
soon there after, some time later this year.  Since its release from Qwaq a
community has grown around Cog, which is also known as the open Smalltalk
VM and lives in Monticello (the Smalltalk code) and github (the generated
and support C/Objective-C/C++ source) and we now have many contributors.
See https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/graphs/contributors

- muO is current and worth having in a collection of images.
>
> - The recent ver 5 release of EToys from the EToys site is the one to use
> and not the 2016 6.0alpha on files.squeak.org.
>
> - (from memory) Spoon became Cog which is now in Squeak.
>

See above


> That's enough for now, thanks!
>
>
> Stu
>

_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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