Awe and horror.

Brad Fuller brad at sonaural.com
Tue Nov 1 19:45:47 UTC 2005


Alan Grimes wrote:

>As I begin to grasp the scope of the optimizations in the interpreter
>and C-Translator, I am filled with a sense of awe. These tweaks were
>obviously done with a deep knowledge of Smalltalk, C, the behavior of C
>compilers, and assembler. At the same time, I'm filled with horror as I
>realize the people who wrote these must of have sold their souls, left
>kidneys, and first born offspring in order to pull it off.
>
>While the VM, as it exists today, is adequate for conventional Squeak as
> it is presently used. Unfortunately, however, the scope and nature of
>its optimizations make it difficult to modify and extend. The
>non-obvious things the C-translator does make VM hacking extremely
>inhospitable to newcomers. For example, I would look at the class
>definition and would think to myself: OK, these "instance" variables
>will be put into a structure that can be instantiated by appropriate
>calls to C, and the class variables will probably end up being static
>variables in the same source file. -- thereby approximating the behavior
>of Smalltalk classes.
>
>Instead, class variables are optimized as constants, and while instance
>variables are put in a structure, there is no way to instantiate the
>structure or manage such instances should they be created. Much much
>worse, however, is that the C translator will behave differently
>depending on which class it is processing and apply special hacks where
>it thinks nobody will notice. -- The hapless newbie probably won't
>discover these hacks until he has read at least 500 messages...
>
>I'm going to try to fork my own version of the vmmaker intended to be
>much more flexible and robust to experimentation though, perhaps, a bit
>slower... (The current version of my custom VM is half as fast but still
>usable...)
>
>The current issue that I'm having trouble with is figuring out exactly
>how the CCode generator interfaces with the system wide compiler. I am
>especially curious as to how to implement scope-reduced variables.
>(variables declared within a block instead of a function...)
>
>How exactly are syntax elements mapped onto the translation classes?
>
>In any event, I hope to have an interesting variation on the VM
>technology someday...
>  
>
As you plod along, can you give us updates of things you find, fix or 
improve? That'd help the rest of us!

brad



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