[Webteam] www.squeak.org Cog reference

[Chris Cunnington]

On Mar 12, 2014, at 9:16 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
>      I love the look of www.squeak.org's front page, however I think the Cog part is out of date and not particularly helpful.  May I make the following suggestions?
> 
> 
> 1. The text underneath "Cog JIT VM" would be better if it used the text from http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog/ (see below)
> 
> 2. the "Cog JIT VM" More... link goes to http://www.squeakvm.org/index.html, which is, I think, a non-sequitur, ecauser the page doesn't say anything obvious about Cog.  If the page is to be kept then it needs to say at least "The Squeak Virtual Machine".  But better might be to link directly to my blog.
> 
> 
> Here's the text from http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog
>  
> "Cog is a virtual machine designed for Smalltalk and other similar dynamic languages.  Cog builds on the Squeak virtual machine adding a stack-to-register-mapping just-in-time compiler, aggressive in-line message cacheing and effective optimization of Smalltalk’s first-class activation records.  Cog is the virtual machine underlying Teleplace’s Croquet-based enterprise virtual collaboration spaces software, the fastest virtual machine for Squeak, and for Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak modular language inspired by Beta and Smalltalk.  Like the original Squeak VM, Cog is implemented and developed in Smalltalk, and translated into a lower-level language to produce the production VM.  Being a Smalltalk program it is a delight to develop.  Cog is available under the MIT open source license and is unencumbered for commercial deployment.
> 
> Cog’s performance relative to the existing Squeak interpreter varies, depending on the benchmark chosen.  As of early-2011, the Cog JIT uses strong inline cacheing techniques and stack-to-register mapping that results in a register-based calling convention for low-arity methods.  Due to the complexity of the Squeak object representation it has a limited set of primitives implemented in machine code that, for example, exclude object allocation.  Performance of the early-2011 JIT for the nbody, binarytrees and chameneos redux benchmarks from the computer language shootout is in the range of 4 to 6 times faster than the interpreter.
> 
> I am writing an occasional series of blog posts describing the implementation on this site. See the Cog category at the left side of the page.  Currently I’m working on a new memory manager with a much improved object representation and garbage collector.  See the Spur category at the left side of the page.
> 
> Cog is now the standard VM for Squeak, Pharo and Newspeak."
> -- 
> best,
> Eliot
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I'll happily make these changes. 
My mind is sort of filled with thoughts of DNS at the moment, but when that settles these changes will go right up. 

Chris 
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