Question about code generation

[J J]

Hi list,

I was just curious how Exupery is able to directly generate the machine 
codes for a given platform.  Squeak runs on a ton of platforms, so Exupery 
would have to have some way to know the codes for all of them.

I am curious because I was wondering about generation of the Squeak VM.  
Right now it is done with a smalltalk looking language called Slang (as you 
all know) that just converts directly to C.  My thinking was the VM 
generator should at a minimum be a GCC front end and possibly build the 
executable itself (the problem with being a GCC front end is that it targets 
C, which may not be flexible enough).  This might allow the VM to do some 
optimizations it can't at the moment (I seem to remember that C doesn't give 
you the information about float overflows, perhaps this might be useful to a 
language like smalltalk that doesn't make one pick the size of their 
numbers).

I haven't looked far enough to see if this would be worthwhile, and I also 
wonder how such a change would play with Exupery.

Thanks,
Jason

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