"Noel J. Bergman" <noel at devtech.com> is widely believed to have written:

>
> > 2) Slang-To-Native code Compiler
> 
> > This was done as part of the mythical (and long gone) Interval Squeak.
> > The idea was to build a new Slang Compiler that could generate not
> > only C-Code, but native machine code for the target plattform. Then
> > they added the possiblility to execute the code at runtime, without
> > restarting the VM. (To add new drivers, etc).
> 
> > The code is available, but hasn´t beed used or maintained for some
> > time. Only ARM is supportet.
> > (Don´t have an URL for this, but I have the code somewhere... I think
> > this is available at Tim Rowledge´s site).
> 
> I don't see it on Tim Rowledge's site.  Could this code be lifted into the
> J3 tree to provide ARM Jitter?
Not even close I'm afraid. The Slang Translator was intended as a Slang
to machine code convertor; mainly for writing device drivers and extra
prims etc to serve the household network controlling devices, WebPads
etc that we were building. It's all dead now; killed by M$ as so many
other things. I suppose it would be possible to extend it in some manner
to be a useful adjunct to the jitter - perhaps using it as a front end
for translating primitives would be useful. Dump out jitter compatible
pseudo-opcodes and the jit them into a suitable cache. This is pretty
similar to VW anyway.
The great success demo of the tranlsator was creating an entire core VM
with it; it ran appreciably faster than one generated via C and then C
complied, at least partly because we were able to do a better job of
understanding that a VM structure is not really suited to a C program.

You can have a copy of the code if you want to consider doing anything
with it;
http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim/pooters/SqFiles/deltas/translator.tar.gz


tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
A computer's attention span is only as long as its extension cord.