[Vm-dev] Slang definition?

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Laurent,

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 11:45 PM Laurent Julliard <laurent at moldus.org>
wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> Thank you for your answers. yes I read the
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/slang page but suspected that may be
> changes had been made to Slang over time. Whic Eliot confirmed.
>
> Actually I'm not thinking of using Slang directly. I'm on a personal
> project right to write a VM in Web Assembly to run Ruby. And rather than
> writing the VM in WebAssembly directly i'd rather write it in Rlang
> (equivalent of Slang for Ruby) and transpile to WebAssembly (WAT format).
>
> So I'm trying to understand all the features that you had to support in
> Slang to make writing a VM possible/easier.
>

It's a lot more than just Slang, although something like Sang is an
essential enabler; necessary but not sufficient :-).  The best overview we
have for our development process is here, in the 2018 section of
https://squeak.org/research/.

Eliot Miranda, Clément Béra, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, and Dan Ingalls. “Two
Decades of Smalltalk VM Development: Live VM Development Through Simulation
Tools.” In Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on
Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages, 57–66. VMIL 2018. New York,
NY, USA: ACM, 2018. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3281287.3281295. [BibTeX]

Does that help ?
>

yes.  I hope that the paper above helps.  LMK...


>
> Laurent
>
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 4:00 AM Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi Laurent,
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 11:10 AM Laurent Julliard <laurent at moldus.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> Is there some place I can find a document describing what subset of
>>> Smalltalk is supported in Slang in its current state?
>>>
>>
>> As others have said there isn't a formal definition. It's also a moving
>> target.  I had to add significant type inference facilities to be able to
>> express both a 64-bit and a 32-bit VM with the same set of sources.  I've
>> also extended it to support literal block arguments to a limited extent.
>> One can't enumerate over objects, but one can supply blocks to iterators.
>>
>> I'm curious what you want to use Slang for.  Answering this might help
>> Slang users/maintainers/extenders to help you.
>>
>>
>>> Thank you.
>>>
>>> Laurent
>>>
>>
>> _,,,^..^,,,_
>> best, Eliot
>>
>

-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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