[squeak-dev] Re: Fwd: Chrome and V8
Stephen Pair
stephen at pairhome.net
Tue Sep 2 21:17:46 UTC 2008
The lively kernel seems to be pretty snappy on it.
- Stephen
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Ron Welch wrote:
>
>>
>> The source code is available at: http://code.google.com/p/v8/
>>
>>
> I'm looking at it now ;-) Talk about a game-changer...
>
> Cheers,
> - Andreas
>
>
>> On 9/2/08 3:23 PM, "John M McIntosh" <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Dave Griswold <David.Griswold.256 at gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:14:32 -0700 (PDT)
>> Subject: Chrome and V8
>> To: Strongtalk-general <strongtalk-general at googlegroups.com>
>>
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> It's been a while, but now that Google has announced Chrome and V8, I
>> can finally make a little clearer a major reason why I haven't been
>> pushing Strongtalk development for quite a while: Chrome's new
>> JavaScript engine V8.
>>
>> The V8 development team has multiple members of the original
>> Animorphic team; it is headed by Lars Bak, who was the technical lead
>> for both Strongtalk and the HotSpot Java VM (as well as a huge
>> contributor to the original Self VM). I think that you will find
>> that V8 has a lot of the creamy goodness of the Strongtalk and Self
>> VMs, with many big architectural improvements:
>>
>> * open source
>> * will run (eventually) on Windows, Linux, and Mac
>> * dynamically JITs to native code
>> * can run completely independently from the browser
>> * generates hidden classes behind the scenes, since javascript doesn't
>> have them (very reminiscent of the 'maps' used in the Self VM).
>> * is multi-threaded from the ground up, with the ability to share VM
>> overhead between different OS processes.
>> * has even smaller object headers than in Strongtalk, making small
>> object overhead even smaller
>> * kick-ass compacting, non-conservative garbage collector
>>
>> The really big deal here is the fundamentally multi-threaded, multi-
>> process nature of the VM. That is something that we don't really have
>> the ability to just hack into the Strongtalk VM; it would involve
>> practically an entire rewrite. Plus, expect a lot of architectural
>> improvements in the source code based on experience with Self,
>> Strongtalk and Java Hotspot VMs.
>>
>> I think these properties will rapidly make V8 the dominant VM for
>> dynamic languages. It ought to make a great platform for Smalltalk.
>>
>> Since I am not a Googler, and they are so secretive, I am not yet
>> privy to all the gory details, but I suspect that it probably won't
>> use type-feedback like Strongtalk, which would be the one big negative
>> (and would mean that it wouldn't be as fast as Strongtalk). However I
>> don't know that for sure, and in any case it will be open source,
>> which means that it might be a nice platform to add type-feedback-
>> based inlining to if they don't do it. At any rate, it *does* JIT to
>> native code, so it will be far faster than Squeak, and probably a lot
>> faster than Visualworks as well.
>>
>> We'll have to see what the details are when the code comes out, but
>> the release of the V8 VM is the beginning of a whole new era for
>> dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, etc).
>>
>> Let the flood of fast new dynamic language implementations begin!
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>>
>>
>> ----------=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-========oOo========-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=----------
>> mailto:Ronald.P.Welch at BAESYSTEMS.com Phone:(607)770-3701
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>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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