On 09/16/2014 06:34 AM, Clément Bera wrote:
The book that explains the best how to implement a high performance VM for Smalltalk and why is Urs Holzle phd http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~urs/oocsb/self/papers/urs-thesis.html.
Agreed. This is good (almost required) reading for anyone who wants to understand how to implement dynamic languages in a way that is not slow, and to understand why performance of dynamic languages does not need to be much slower than that of statically-typed languages.
After reading this paper, it's also good to think about the fact that it describes work that was done over 20 years ago, and that hardware has changed a great deal in the interim, and think hard about what improvements might be made today over the techniques that Urs and the Self team came up with back then.
Regards,
-Martin