The Animorphic Smalltalk VM was very high performance. It ran on
Intel (Win95, I think). My guess is that it would be a fair amount of
work to port it, since I think they used some assembly code to get
speed and, of course, it includes a dynamic translator (JIT).

Their Smalltalk image and class hierarchy was quite interesting. It
had a type checker and type inferencing system based on abstract
interfaces ("protocols"), but the type checking was optional. You
could write code without type declarations during exploratory
programming, then fill in the declarations later.

	-- John


At 11:14 PM +0200 7/16/01, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>on 7/16/01 12:58 PM, Joern Eyrich at Joern.Eyrich at brokat.com wrote:
>
>> are there any news about this yet? like, *how* soon?
>> 
>> Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> Gilad Bracha from Sun told me that the animorphic VM and Smalltalk code they
>>> made just before Java went breaking research at Sun will be available soon.
>>> 
>>> In this code they introduced mixins (which I think are interested but need
>>> some extra work) and mirrors that encapsulated reflective aspects to be
>>> composable.
>>> 
>>> So I'm really eager to play with it.
>>> 
>>> Stef
>
>Gilad said for the end of the summer but you can ask him directly
>gilad.bracha at eng.sun.com
>
>stef