Subjective Squeak

Allen Wirfs-Brock Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com
Fri Dec 13 21:45:33 UTC 2002


>"Stephen Pair" <spair at acm.org> wrote:
> > But even the stack optimizations that are in VI4
> > concern me a bit.  It seems like that goes too far into the research
> > realm and jeopardizes the acceptance of the work done on block closures.
> > Everyone knows what block closures are and why they are needed; there is
> > a much greater chance of them getting into the base VM if they don't
> > come with extra stuff that's less well understood and proven.

I hope nobody really thinks that the topic of using an activation stack to 
implement Smalltalk is a "research" topic. It is a proven technique that 
has been used successfully by a number of Smalltalk implementations (In 
fact, I pretty sure that the majority of Smalltalk systems that are not 
directly derived from the Smalltalk-80 code base use this technique).  You 
certainly can debate the design merits of a heap implementation compared to 
a stack implementation or debate the quality of a stack-based design, but 
anyone who thinks that using a stack for Smalltalk is something new 
obviously hasn't done their homework.

Allen_Wirfs-Brock at instantiations.com




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