Update on Dynamic Primitives

Hans-Martin Mosner hmm at heeg.de
Fri Nov 13 12:05:57 UTC 1998


Hello all,

in the last couple of weeks, I've made some more progress towards
compiling primitives directly to native code from within Squeak.
I'm now able to compile the PluckedSound and SampledSound primitives to
native code which runs just as fast as the original primitives generated
via intermediate C code. And this is completely without optimizations...

I don't think that including the stuff in the next release would make
any sense, since it's still too much in flow, and there's no framework
for other processor architectures than PowerPC yet. I can imagine
putting the support primitive into the mainstream VM since it's fairly
small and easily portable. So people could just load the code generation
into their image when it's usable and can just go ahead without
re-generating their VM.

My current plans (if family and job permit) are to have a version for
PowerPC and 68K ready for christmas. This will probably not include FP
operations yet, but it should be able to do some interesting sound and
graphics things. (maybe Andreas Raab's font rendering, too?)

I do not yet have a clear picture how this meshes with the pluggable
primitive support. Probably the two systems can complement each other.
I could also imagine doing the wavelet stuff and the font rendering
stuff using dynamic primitives, but I would have to try that out first.

I'll keep the list informed about further development...

Hans-Martin





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