Guys, things are becoming interesting :)
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Chrome and V8 Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:14:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Dave Griswold David.Griswold.256@gmail.com Reply-To: strongtalk-general@googlegroups.com To: Strongtalk-general strongtalk-general@googlegroups.com
Hi everyone,
It's been a while, but now that Google has announced Chrome and V8, I can finally make a little clearer a major reason why I haven't been pushing Strongtalk development for quite a while: Chrome's new JavaScript engine V8.
The V8 development team has multiple members of the original Animorphic team; it is headed by Lars Bak, who was the technical lead for both Strongtalk and the HotSpot Java VM (as well as a huge contributor to the original Self VM). I think that you will find that V8 has a lot of the creamy goodness of the Strongtalk and Self VMs, with many big architectural improvements:
* open source * will run (eventually) on Windows, Linux, and Mac * dynamically JITs to native code * can run completely independently from the browser * generates hidden classes behind the scenes, since javascript doesn't have them (very reminiscent of the 'maps' used in the Self VM). * is multi-threaded from the ground up, with the ability to share VM overhead between different OS processes. * has even smaller object headers than in Strongtalk, making small object overhead even smaller * kick-ass compacting, non-conservative garbage collector
The really big deal here is the fundamentally multi-threaded, multi- process nature of the VM. That is something that we don't really have the ability to just hack into the Strongtalk VM; it would involve practically an entire rewrite. Plus, expect a lot of architectural improvements in the source code based on experience with Self, Strongtalk and Java Hotspot VMs.
I think these properties will rapidly make V8 the dominant VM for dynamic languages. It ought to make a great platform for Smalltalk.
Since I am not a Googler, and they are so secretive, I am not yet privy to all the gory details, but I suspect that it probably won't use type-feedback like Strongtalk, which would be the one big negative (and would mean that it wouldn't be as fast as Strongtalk). However I don't know that for sure, and in any case it will be open source, which means that it might be a nice platform to add type-feedback- based inlining to if they don't do it. At any rate, it *does* JIT to native code, so it will be far faster than Squeak, and probably a lot faster than Visualworks as well.
We'll have to see what the details are when the code comes out, but the release of the V8 VM is the beginning of a whole new era for dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, etc).
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