Hi Jacel,
Can you please confirm what version of the interpreter VM you are building? For me, using up to date sources from squeakvm.org, my VM is labeled as version '4.20.5.3825':
Virtual Machine
---------------
/usr/local/lib/squeak/4.20.5-3825/squeakvm
Squeak4.6 of 21 July 2021 [latest update: #15118]
Unix built on Sep 27 2023 21:10:42 Compiler: 11.4.0
platform sources revision 3825
VMMaker versionString 4.20.5
Regarding image versions (V3, Spur, etc) you may want to load package 'ImageFormat' from the VMMaker repository (https://source.squeak.org/VMMaker). Class ImageFormat is the executable documentation for image formats. It also provides the C source for the compiled ckformat program that you will find in your VM folder when you compile an interpreter VM.
In my own experience, the interpreter VM feels very "snappy" as you say, but opensmalltalk-vm is much faster for anything involving computation or significant workload. For example, Anything involving Monticello qualifies as significant workload so opensmalltalk-vm makes a huge difference there. But I find any of these VMs quite impressive when running on modern hardware.
Dave
Yesterday I managed to compile the intepreter VM on a StarFive
VisionFive 2 board (after replacing the config.guess with a current one
having gone through several dead ends before figuring that out). The
images in the download page have no indication about being V3 or Spur,
so I first tried a 5.0 image and when that didn't work I got a 4.0 one
that did.
I was a bit surprised at how snappy the interpreted Squeak felt on a
1.5GHz reasonably simple RISC-V. Most other applications on that machine
(web browser, Open Office, a digital simulator in Java) run much slower
than on my work computer (Intel Core i5-8259U CPU @ 2.30GHz) so I didn't
expect that.
Running "0 tinyBenchmarks" got me a result of about -660 thousand
bytecodes per second and 47 thousand sends per second. I will try to
find out how this negative result came about and it is very likely that
the other result is completely wrong as well.
Here are the results on my work machine (with a Cog VM):
0 tinyBenchmarks '1150561797 bytecodes/sec; 32470183 sends/sec'
Having the email client able to evaluate Smalltalk expressions can be
very convenient at times ;-)
-- Jecel