[Vm-dev] Re: Dalvik vs. ART: Android virtual machines and the battle for better performance | Pocketnow

[Eliot Miranda]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 1:07 PM, askoh <askoh at askoh.com> wrote:

>
> I am not a VM guy. But, is the Smalltalk in a C World article compiling
> Smalltalk to machine code to run without the VM?
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dc552/papers/SmalltalkInACWorld.pdf
>
> He talks about the VM being a relic of the past. Is that true?
>

Is the Java VM a relic of the past?  Given portable devices is compiled
code a relic of the past?  Is a safe development environment with fast
compile times a thing of the past?  Their own conclusions imply that the
answer is not yet:

"Our current approach lacks some of the advantages of Smalltalk. The most
obvious of these is debugging. Our current implementation emits very sparse
DWARF debugging information and so is fairly limited in terms of debugging
support even in comparison to C, and therefore a long way behind the state
of the art for Smalltalk circa 1980. This is currently the focus of ongoing
work. Once this is done, then implementing things like thisContext making
use of debug metadata become possible. In our current implementation,
run-time introspection is only available for objects and variables bound to
blocks, not for activation records.

Closely related is the rest of the IDE. In traditional Smalltalk
implementations, the IDE is closely integrated with the execution
environment. GNU Smalltalk is the major exception, and provides a model
close to ours. Building a good IDE and debugger is beyond the scope of the
LanguageKit project, but building these tools on top of LanguageKit is a
goal of E ́toile ́."


>
> All the best,
> Aik-Siong Koh
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://forum.world.st/Dalvik-vs-ART-Android-virtual-machines-and-the-battle-for-better-performance-Pocketnow-tp4729727p4729982.html
> Sent from the Squeak VM mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>



-- 
best,
Eliot
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