Re: Wiki Up

"It would seem to me that the bytecodes and primitives could be made compatible with the Strongtalk VM, but you'd lose the loveliness of writing the VM in Smalltalk."

I don't think there's any loveliness to Squeak's VM having been written in Smalltalk.  It was a simple hack that was worth very little.  Basically they worked out a very very limited subset of Smalltalk that has C semantics and can be translated to C with a very simple script.  And they did this only because they liked the Smalltalk environment for debugging.  

After they got a VM debugged in C compatible Smalltalk, they ran the translation script and never went back to the interpreter.  So the real result of this is that half of the VM is written in an alternate syntax for C that looks a bit like Smalltalk.

It might have been a usable strategy if they'd put thought into future expansion of the VM and made the compiler capable parameterizing changes to the VM.  But they didn't, it was all hard coded down to the offsets of field (byte offsets!)

Now we have good debuggers for C++ and it makes more sense to write in C++, debug in C++ and thus have much more powerful language to base the code in.

Joshua Scholar

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jim Haungs 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 6:24 PM
  Subject: Re: Wiki Up


  I haven't looked at the latest versions of Squeak, but from what I remember, it generates the VM in C from a VM written in a pidgin Smalltalk and hosted within Squeak itself.  Given that Squeak is self-generating and self-hosting, what exactly does it mean to "run the Squeak image on the Strongtalk VM" if the Squeak VM is not written (in the conventional sense) in C itself? 

  It would seem to me that the bytecodes and primitives could be made compatible with the Strongtalk VM, but you'd lose the loveliness of writing the VM in Smalltalk.

  Or are you thinking in the other direction? Of rewriting/hosting the Strongtalk VM in pidgin Smalltalk and generating the C VM?  This seems more difficult in the short run, but potentially easier to maintain in the long run. 

  Jim



  On 4/30/07, David Griswold <[email protected]> wrote: 

    Hi everybody,

    I've gotten the Wiki going, and I've started populating it with some basic 
    information.  If you would like to work on it too, you will need to be a
    member of the project.  See
    http://code.google.com/p/strongtalk/wiki/Contributing for information on how
    to join (and for our procedures on how to contribute code).

    -Dave

    

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