Re: Wiki Up

On 3-May-07, at 9:05 PM, Cafe Alpha wrote:

> "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.
I claim you are very wrong here. There are several other virtues to  
having the VM mostly written in Smalltalk; first being that you don't  
have to put up with C. C is a poorly done attempt at a poshed up  
assembler and I fear that it's pervasive baleful influence has held  
back the wold of software by decades. Next, one can run the Squeak VM  
in Squesk not just to debug it but to simulate and instrument it.  
Trivial example - I made the changes to implement a new non-hybrid  
CompiledMethod format, wrote a SystemTracer, created an image, ran it  
in simulation, found optimisations and fixed a bug all without having  
to suffer C.


> 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.
Yuck. Blech. Terrible idea. Far better to improve Slang so as to  
never need to go near C again.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [email protected]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- AMICUS PURIAE - Platonic friend



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