[Vm-dev] how can I build a sista spur 64 vm?

[David T. Lewis]

Hi Cl??ment,

Sista works fine on 64 bits :-)

Eliot added the necessary image support to Squeak, based on your eariler
Pharo implementation. We switched Squeak trunk over to Sista in trunk
a few weeks ago, and have had no problems at all. All Squeak development
is proceeding with Sista as the default bytecode, and most of us are
on 64-bits.

So thank you!
Dave


On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 06:58:37PM +0100, Cl??ment B??ra wrote:
>  
> Hi Robert,
> 
> I worked on sista and I don't think I have ever tried it on 64 bits. I run
> my experiments on x86. My expectation for 64 bits is that you have to write
> build files inspired from the 32 bits
> sista.spur and the 64 bits cog.spur files. Then you have to run it in the
> VM simulator and fix the various few problems you see (likely a few
> instructions are not implemented in the
> x64 back-end). Then you can build a system. It's not so much work.
> 
> There was a released alpha version of Sista [1], which I used to run the
> benchmark of a research paper [2]. If you compile a VM with sources from
> that time (recent sources have difference
> that will break it), and follow the guidelines from the blog post [1], you
> should be able to reproduce the benchmark results from the paper.
> 
> As I remember it, most benchmarks run without crashes at 1.5x and the
> development tools could be run for a while without crashes. Debugging and
> on-the-fly code changes in sista are
> only partially implemented (there's the potential to do it, but one has to
> implement it). I would say it is currently in a similar state as the
> strongtalk VM [3], while being compatible with
> Squeak and other Cog clients.
> 
> I don't know what you mean by operational. If you're looking to experiment
> with it, tweak it to run some benchmarks, then you should be able to do it.
> If you're looking to deploy an application
> on a production VM, then significant work is left to do so (discuss
> directly with Eliot if that is the case).
> 
> Have fun with the project :-)
> 
> [1] https://clementbera.wordpress.com/2017/07/19/sista-open-alpha-release/
> [2] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01596321/
> [3] http://strongtalk.org/
> 
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 3:43 PM Robert <robert.withers at pm.me> wrote:
> 
> >
> > I understand that Sista is operational. I would like to try. How can I
> > build a Sista vm? I went to linux64x64/squeak.sista.spur and there is a
> > file there NotYetImplemented.
> >
> > I appreciate any guidance.
> >
> > --
> > Kindly,
> > Robert
> >
> >
> >
> 
> -- 
> Cl??ment B??ra
> https://clementbera.github.io/
> https://clementbera.wordpress.com/