VM improvement: speeding up failing calls of functions in missing modules

Stephan Rudlof sr at evolgo.de
Sat Feb 5 15:43:05 UTC 2000


Tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> Marcus Denker wrote:
> 
> > ST/X is *really* worth a look. It's a very interesting system.
> > Besides Java it has a very good C integration. You can simply write C-code
> > in a normal Smalltalk method, e.g. (from the documentation):
> [snippeed examples]
> 
> If anyone is interested in taking it over, I can give out the code for
> the codegenerator that Alan Purdy wrote for the Intervla RTOSmalltalk
> project. It's not absolutely complete, and needs backends for anything
> other than ARM, but it was successfully used to generate an entire
> working VM. Surely a much nicer idea than having to have some crummy C
> compiler on your machine as well as Squeak.

If I understand you correctly the RTOSmalltalk codegenerator compiles
directly from ST to Assembler without intermediate C code. This is
interesting, but leads to some questions:

How difficult is it to call the OS by ANSI-C functions?
How difficult is it to ensure compatibility between different platforms?

What about the performance of the generated code compared with
ST->C->Assembler generation by Squeak C codegenerator followed by gcc?

Last but not least: What about license issues?


Greetings,

Stephan





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