Hi list,
I was just curious how Exupery is able to directly generate the machine codes for a given platform. Squeak runs on a ton of platforms, so Exupery would have to have some way to know the codes for all of them.
I am curious because I was wondering about generation of the Squeak VM. Right now it is done with a smalltalk looking language called Slang (as you all know) that just converts directly to C. My thinking was the VM generator should at a minimum be a GCC front end and possibly build the executable itself (the problem with being a GCC front end is that it targets C, which may not be flexible enough). This might allow the VM to do some optimizations it can't at the moment (I seem to remember that C doesn't give you the information about float overflows, perhaps this might be useful to a language like smalltalk that doesn't make one pick the size of their numbers).
I haven't looked far enough to see if this would be worthwhile, and I also wonder how such a change would play with Exupery.
Thanks, Jason
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