Fear and loathing of the "perlification" of Smalltalk

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 18:12:02 UTC 2007


Ah right.  Yes, I knew of some Smalltalks that compile straight to
assembler, but since a VM was mentioned, I thought there was some new
idea or believed to be some new idea.

On 9/10/07, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org> wrote:
>
> Here is a paper on Smalltalk without byte codes, although a bit dated.
> You'll need to be a member of ACM to download it.
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=28708&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM&CFID=34496579&CFTOKEN=35186959
>
> "We have implemented Smalltalk-80 on an instruction-level simulator for
> a RISC microcomputer called SOAR. Measurements suggest that even a
> conventional computer can provide high performance for Smalltalk-80 by
> abandoning the 'Smalltalk Virtual Machine' in favor of compiling
> Smalltalk directly to SOAR machine code, linearizing the activation
> records on the machine stack, eliminating the object table, and
> replacing reference counting with a new technique called Generation
> Scavenging. In order to implement these techniques, we had to find new
> ways of hashing objects, accessing often-used objects, invoking blocks,
> referencing activation records, managing activation record stacks, and
> converting the virtual machine images."
>
> I've seen other papers as well on this topic. Byte codes are but one way
> to do things.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter
>
>
>



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