[squeak-dev] re: would it be fun to implement Squeak (and SPOON!) on this hardware?

Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com
Mon Dec 23 14:02:22 UTC 2013


2013/12/23 Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>

> On 2013-12-23, at 00:24, Craig Latta <craig at netjam.org> wrote:
>
> >> Why not strip the VM down as far as possible too, and pull in
> >> additional things when needed?  Just enough VM to run a minimal
> >> Spoon. It doesn't have to be fast; it can pull in speedup methods
> >> as needed (or perhaps even swap itself for a fancier VM on the
> >> fly???).
> >
> >     Sure, that's the plan. I first asked someone to help with that in
> > 1998. It's not hard. No one has decided to devote time to it. Now's your
> > chance. :)
>
> One thing would be to compile the VM without inlining. Another to remove
> the non-essential primitives, which have a fallback in image (*). Even more
> primitives could be made optional if the image had more fallbacks. Or if
> you knew the image wasn't going to use those primitives, which might be the
> case in Spoon. Also quite a bit of code is devoted to purely to optimizing
> - the method cache, at-caches etc.
>
> - Bert -
>
> (*) but don't be surprised if the fallback code suffers from bitrot. It is
> never executed on regular VMs with all the primitives in place. Having
> recently implemented a minimal VM I did discover those bugs ;)
>

Yep, I saw at least one when I failed to change some primitive and made it
accidentally fail.
For better testability, we could isolate the fallback code under a separate
method, but that would consume a bunch of selectors and somehow be
contradictory with a principle of economy - less is more.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20131223/549ef65a/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list