Common Smalltalk VM Summit

Hi everybody,

Dan Ingalls and I have been talking, trying to figure out what to do about
the major opportunity offered by the recent release of the Strongtalk
virtual machine as open source.

Rather than keep this discussion to ourselves, our thinking was that this
would be the perfect time to call a kind of summit, with representatives of
all the major Smalltalk implementations, both open-source and commercial.
The topic: what if we could build a shared high-performance open-source
platform suitable for hosting a number of different Smalltalk systems, one
that we can all share and work on together?

While the details of the type-feedback techniques used in the Strongtalk VM
are arcane, the benefits are not: *much* higher performance for general
Smalltalk code.  Dan, myself, and many others who know about type-feedback
and the pioneering Self system, have been dreaming for many years about the
possibility that someday this technology might make it into mainstream
Smalltalk VMs.  It would take Smalltalk performance to a whole new level.

That someday is here now, if the different factions within the Smalltalk
community can pull together a little bit so that we don't miss this
opportunity.

There may be debate within the community about some aspects of the
Strongtalk project, for example the type system, but we should all be able
to agree on the simple idea that a whole lot more performance would be a
Good Thing.  Now a huge performance gift has suddenly shown up on our
doorstep.

The last thing Smalltalk needs is another incompatible implementation.  The
splintering of Smalltalk implementations has dispersed the huge amount of
talent and effort needed to build, port, maintain, and extend a really good
virtual-machine.  Alone, this is a problem for each of us.  Together, a
really good, super-fast type-feedback VM is for the first time within reach.

I would like to invite the smart people out there who know and care most
about the various Smalltalk virtual machines, to join Dan and I in a fairly
focused discussion about this starting tomorrow (Thursday, PST) on the
Strongtalk discussion group, at
http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general.  I will be out of the
country for 6 weeks starting Wed the 11th, so I would like to propose that
we try to go back and forth about this a few times by the end of Friday, so
we can think about this over the weekend, and maybe come up with a proposed
general course of action by the middle of next week, so we all have
something to think about until my return.

Let's not lose this opportunity.

Cheers,
Dave


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David Griswold wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> Dan Ingalls and I have been talking, trying to figure out what to do about
> the major opportunity offered by the recent release of the Strongtalk
> virtual machine as open source.

It seems you've come up with an excellent plan of attack, and I'm glad
to see people really trying to make this happen. I had the thought
independently less than a week ago, after evaluating a dozen Smalltalk
VM's for a potential commercial project.

>
> Rather than keep this discussion to ourselves, our thinking was that this
> would be the perfect time to call a kind of summit, with representatives of
> all the major Smalltalk implementations, both open-source and commercial.
> The topic: what if we could build a shared high-performance open-source
> platform suitable for hosting a number of different Smalltalk systems, one
> that we can all share and work on together?

It sounds like a worthy goal, and I'm surprised nobody else has
responded to this message. This sounds like a great first step, although
I had also had the thought that *maybe* it would be possible to get an
unofficial Smalltalk-2007 specification, which would be a very clear
unofficial (but community-supported, since all interested parties would
have a stake and hand in writing the specification) revision to the
de-facto Smalltalk-80 standard and/or ANSI Smalltalk standard.

>
> While the details of the type-feedback techniques used in the Strongtalk VM
> are arcane, the benefits are not: *much* higher performance for general
> Smalltalk code.  Dan, myself, and many others who know about type-feedback
> and the pioneering Self system, have been dreaming for many years about the
> possibility that someday this technology might make it into mainstream
> Smalltalk VMs.  It would take Smalltalk performance to a whole new level.

Which I'd love to see. On a somewhat-related but tangential note, has
anybody done any experimental porting of Exupery to ARM (ARM11,
specifically) CPUs?

>
> That someday is here now, if the different factions within the Smalltalk
> community can pull together a little bit so that we don't miss this
> opportunity.

As a developer interested in using Smalltalk in a commercial product,
this would be greatly beneficial to not only myself, but surely many
others as well.

Agreed! And the BSD license is quite permissive and flexible, to boot.
I'm looking forward to it.
>
> Let's not lose this opportunity.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave

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Sorry about the delay in responding.

Alex Perez writes:
 > Which I'd love to see. On a somewhat-related but tangential note, has
 > anybody done any experimental porting of Exupery to ARM (ARM11,
 > specifically) CPUs?

I've thought about doing an ARM port. In some ways Exupery would
suit an ARM better than the x86, more registers. The only extra
complexity besides porting details would be scheduling instructions.
ARMs tend to be in-order CPUs.

ARMs are a nice complement to the x86. 3 operand, more registers, a
clean RISC instruction set, in-order. Running on both the ARM and the
x86 would definitely cover the portability story. However, about 90%
of the portability work could be done as an x86-64 bit port (they have
different C calling conventions).

 > Agreed! And the BSD license is quite permissive and flexible, to boot.
 > >
 > > I would like to invite the smart people out there who know and care most
 > > about the various Smalltalk virtual machines, to join Dan and I in a fairly
 > > focused discussion about this starting tomorrow (Thursday, PST) on the
 > > Strongtalk discussion group, at
 > > http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general.  I will be out of the
 > > country for 6 weeks starting Wed the 11th, so I would like to propose that
 > > we try to go back and forth about this a few times by the end of Friday, so
 > > we can think about this over the weekend, and maybe come up with a proposed
 > > general course of action by the middle of next week, so we all have
 > > something to think about until my return.
 >
 > I'm looking forward to it.

The common VM summit has unfortunately been and gone, though you can
read about it on the Strongtalk mailing list, there was a little
discussion on Squeak's vm-dev list too. There's a link to the
Strongtalk mailing list archives above and a link to the vm-dev list
archives below.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev

Bryce
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