Many thanks, Alan. This will be really fascinating to read about!

	-- John


>The recent interesting discussion of performance and vm architectures
>motivated to get permission to publish the specification of one of the
>architectures I developed over the years. It can be found at:
>http://www.smalltalksystems.com/publications/avmarch.pdf
>
>The following is from the document's introduction:
>
>This document  describes a bytecode architecture for an experimental
>Smalltalk virtual machine.  The architecture was originally developed by
>the authors at Digitalk Inc. in 1993-1994.  This document is published with
>the permission of ObjectShare Inc, the successor company to Digitalk.
>
>This architecture is intended to be used for the representation of compiled
>method in the context of dynamic translating ("JIT") virtual machine. As
>such, its main purpose is to provide information that can be easily and
>efficiently processed by such a translator. An important design goal was
>the minimization of the space needed to represent compiled methods.
>Because it was design to be the input to a translator, minimization of
>decoding time was not a consideration of the design. It was not intended
>for direct interpretation and certain features, such as the "Label"
>construct would be inefficient if used by an interpreter.
>
>Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com