[Vm-dev] About BitBlt on the Raspberry Pie VM

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 05.02.2015, at 15:02, Clément Bera <bera.clement at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am asking it because last time I discussed with Bert, he said that it would be fun to have a smalltalk-implemented BitBlt combined with a JIT compiler doing automatic vectorization in order to have vector graphics implemented as Bit-based graphics. The more I think about it the more I think this makes sense. Even if it's in the far future (I'm stabilizing inlining and SmallInteger range optimizations first in the JIT), I would like to go in that direction.

I'm not exactly sure what we talked about (IIRC there was very nice beer involved) but with "vectorization" I guess I did not mean vector graphics, but using CPU vector instructions, which operate on multiple machine words at once.

About running the Smalltalk Slang code directly instead of transpiling the BitBlt plugin to C: that is what Lars Wassermann and Tim Felgentreff are doing in the RSqueak VM. And quite successfully, it's certainly fast enough to be usable.

- Bert -

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