Introducing Huemul

[sig]

Good! Your reply shows me that i may not vorry about this.

Then i would ask you about design of your VM architecture.
Its better to start from a clean view, that everything in VM could be
changed at some point.
And changed by programmer using smalltalk, not C or other external tools.
I mean, i want a truly flexible system.
I want to be able the smalltalk VM to rebuild self from scratch
(producing new VM executable) without using C complier/e.t.c.
And be able to change any low level primitives in running VM.
As example - let programmer to decide, how to tag smallintegers , with
0 or with 1 ,
and make this as easy as clicking a single button, just by changing a
single line of code in single place.
This will open a wide range perspective, how programmer can experiment
with VM, how he can add or change its core functionality and test it.
Another example - suppose we want to run our VM/image on different
platform. All we need is a hooks (like special binary format,
accessing to kernel function e.t.c), provided by that platform and
assembler support from Exupery to generate opcodes suitable for
platform CPU. The we generate a small bootstrap executable, which then
can be used for loading image in new platform, and providing a
bootstrapping mechanism for recompiling a core VM methods contained in
your image.
So, you can keep any low-level VM code in your image and be able to
run it anywhere without dependancy from external tools like C compiler
or linker e.t.c.

On 23/05/07, Guillermo Adrián Molina <guille at losmolina.com.ar> wrote:
>
> > great job.
> Thank you very much.
>
> > I'm just wondering, why its not a part of squeak :)
>
> Well, that's Bryce job :-)
> I mean. Exupery will be part of Squeak one day (a very important one).
> But Exupery is facing with the fact that most Squeak's internals can't be
> changed.
> I have the ability to change what ever I want in Huemul. An example, Bryce
> suggested 0 tagged SmallInts. I was using 1 tagged, changed that in a
> week, then Huemul got faster. The fact is that I am really into learning
> things. I didn't know how to implement 0 tagged int. Thanks to Klaus (a
> member of this list), I was able to do it.
> That kind of reaction is more difficult in Squeak.
>
> > At some day i thought, why i want to reinvent the wheel, while there's
> > already a good and working smalltalk implementation with reach set of
> > projects/features.
>
> I completely agree with you on this matters, I will try to make Huemul
> compatible with most of them.
>
> > And i decided to join squeak community, and asking you to do the same.
> > You can benefit from others works, while doing your part.
>
> Believe me, I use Squeak.
> There is another thing. Huemul is a Linux X86-32 application. Squeak
> images run without modification on lots of platforms. It would be very
> difficult to do that with Huemul. I think the target is different.
>
> > For example: i know a good guy 'gulik' on IRC who is already doing a
> > namespaces. So better to help him, rather than implement own.
> > And there's many other areas which intersects with your goals, like
> > HTML, GUI, Dynamic class loading e.t.c.
> > I think you just need to focus on narrow area - making a good and fast
> > VM, and then just share your code with others and reuse their code for
> > own matters.
> > Don't think that i want to offend you in this way, i'm just thinking
> > it would be better for you as well as for community.
> >
>
> Don't worry. I asked you for advise. Everybody is welcome.
>
> Cheers, Guille
>
>
>
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