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

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi David,


> On Mar 24, 2020, at 11:40 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

Using the non-optimizing standard part of the bytecode set is one thing and a long way from having a functional Scorch adaptive optimizer editing the system behind the scenes.  Clément has this working in 32-bits in Pharo.  I want it working in both 32 and 64 bits in Squeak, and as I just explained I want it working in the simulator first.  Of course having the Sista bytecode art and full blocks as the default is good progress in the right direction toon, but there’s a ways to go yet.

> 
> 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/
>