Introducing Huemul

[sig]

On 23/05/07, Guillermo Adrián Molina <guille at losmolina.com.ar> wrote:
> Yes, I would like such a system too.
> But right now, Huemul is very far away from that.
> Huemul's core is still in C. To translate it to ST, I would need your
> compiler.
> That is why I asked you about it. Klaus suggested that it would be
> interesting to use it, just the way you want.
>
> I am getting close to a Huemul release that doesn't need Squeak. When that
> is done. I will finally release source code, for anyone to play with it.
>
> Cheers, Guille
>
> PS: May be the example about changing SmallInts behavior would be a bit
> difficult to implement. Not the part of getting 0 or 1 tagged arithmetic,
> that part would be easy to implement for both behaviors. The problem is
> the way you access the other objects. It is much more difficult to access
> an oop with a 1 tagged int system, than a 0 tagged one. Believe me, the
> hardest part of implementing 0 tagged wasn't the arithmetic part, at
> least, that was my experience with Huemul. But apart from that, I got the
> idea behind the example, and I agree with you.
>
Yes , its somewhat complex and requires a special handling in many
places, but still, this  can be implemented at abstract level , such
that any dependant code don't require any additional changes.
Another example: on 64 bit systems we can use 2 bits for tag, and be
able to make smallints, floats,chars immediate values.
If someone wants to keep boxed floats, so just let him do this , all
he's need is to supply a class name, which holds all low-level
primitives written by him for that purpose.