Folks,
I've been running Tim Rowledge's NCM VM and image (see http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim) on win32 successfully for a while now. I'd like to offer a short performance report, because I think (and feel) that I get appreciable results.
The two machines I have infected with Squeak are: A Toshiba Satellite 2520 (K6-2 at 300 MHz, 64 MB, Win98) and a Dell XPS system (P-II at 300 MHz, 128 MB, NT4SP4). The results have not failed to impress me:
<Tosh/Win98> benchFib benchmark [approx.] [sends/s] [bytecodes/s] -------------------------------------------- Squeak 2.3b 595,000 10,245,000 NCMVM 2.3 734,453 10,869,000 Jitter 2.3b 994,000 16,233,000
<Dell/NT4SP4> benchFib benchmark [approx.] [sends/s] [bytecodes/s] -------------------------------------------- Squeak 2.3b 654,000 11,111,000 NCMVM 2.3 768,757 12,165,000 Jitter 2.3b 913,000 16,666,000
Please note that NCM ("new compiled method format") does not try to improve upon Jitter, it is an improvement upon the non-Jitter base VM/image (yet). I included the Jitter figures for relative comparison. As I said, I'm impressed.
I have measured neither memory consumption nor J2 performance, though I'd be very curious if others have. At these significant rates, I wonder what a J2-NCM VM could do...
All in all, I'd vote for merging Tim's improvements into mainline Squeak (2.5?). Not only does NCM enhance the malleability of the VM, it's faster too. How much more could we probably want?
Regards, Helge