Coding and stuff

RSqueak/VM - A research VM for Squeak/Smalltalk

by Tim Felgentreff ,

RSqueak/VM - A research VM for Squeak/Smalltalk

For the past few years, we have been quietly working on RSqueak/VM, an RPython-based VM for Squeak/Smalltalk. The VM is still under development, mostly in short bursts and pushes, but is beginning to be useable and shows promising results.

RSqueak/VM grew out of the SpyVM work done by Carl Friedrich Bolz, Adrian Kuhn, Adrian Lienhard, Nicholas D. Matsakis, Oscar Nierstrasz, Lukas Renggli, Armin Rigo, and Toon Verwaest, but has since been extended by Lars Wassermann, Anton Gulenko, Tobias Pape, and myself.

We have done many interesting experiments with RSqueak/VM, including using STM, strategies, and most recently we have attempted to get performance up to run as many primitives as possible in pure Smalltalk, including such primitives used for large integer arithmetic, string operations, TrueType font rendering, bézier curves, display compositing, and more. We are not quite there yet for an alpha release, but a set of benchmarks we ran today show that we are getting close :)

SMark


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