Jecel Assumpcao Jr schrieb:
I am back from a nice vacation (my first since 1982...) and see that you have all been waiting patiently for me to return before starting any interesting discussions ;-)
Ok, now that you're back, I can finally ask the questions which have puzzled me ever since :-) When implementing Smalltalk hardware, what kind of object memory design would you prefer: - object table vs. direct pointer - ref counting vs. generation scavenging cs -whatever- - page-based virtual memory vs. object-based VM vs. none at all - in-band tags vs. out-of-band tags Let me explain the last one. Smalltalk Implementations have typically had in-bad tags, i.e. the tags have only meaning in a word which is known to be an oop. The Burroughs machines had out-of-band tags, that is, every memory word had an additional tag. That way, you could even know whether a memory word contained uninterpreted bytes, a float value, or an "oop" (descriptor).
One interesting side effect of this trip is that I now have a new FPGA development kit - the ML401 from Xilinx.
Just out of curiosity: how much does one pay for such a kit? I don't know whether my wife would approve of a major investment into something of little perceived value :-)
Cheers, Hans-Martin