iMac support

Bryce & Exupery-minded folks:

I am using Pharo on an iMac for an in-house project that may later  
become a commercial product. My main displeasure with Pharo right now  
is performance; it sounds like Exupery may help greatly.

With that in mind, I am willing to help with Exupery, at least in  
terms of compilation on the iMac. I must be realistic about my time: I  
won't be able to invest a block of time until November or December.  
Still, along the way, I can begin exploring and learning.

My background (which I may already have shamelessly provided on some  
squeak list): I have written a million-plus of lines of code in C,  
always with an eye on performance (we rolled our own Objective-C like  
environment in the 1980's and early 1990's to build a radiation  
treatment planning system -- the product is used widely around the  
globe today... so it works!); also, I have written several byte-code  
interpreters over the years, so I am familiar with the general  
principles. The catch: I haven't compiled a C program in over 12  
years, except for turnkey GNU products. Furthermore, my coding during  
the last 12 years has been part-time in Python (extensively), java,  
gawk, or perl, and smalltalk (during the last year or so); as a  
result, the jargon I use is ... antiquated, if not corrupted, and  
quite simply, derelict. (Add to that the fact that I often type too  
fast and hit send too quickly... )

So... where to begin? I know I recently saw a link, but if you could  
please give me some direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Cam





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On Sun, 2009-07-05 at 13:51 -0400, Cameron Sanders wrote:
A x86 Mac port should be relatively simple. There are two issues
to deal with:
 * Don't use gcc 4.0.1 because of a bug in the optimiser
 * Change the flags to mmap to work on the Mac

The problem is gcc 4.0.1 is the one in xcode so the normal one used on
the Mac. When we tried porting to the Mac at ESUG in Lugano we worked
around the gcc bug by using -O0 switching off gcc's optimisations.

Exupery itself may need a little more work before it's providing a
practical performance improvement. It can speed up real code now, and it
will do better with a little tuning of the profiler that drives
compilation.

Bryce

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Thanks for the reply Bryce.

There are a lot of references scattered around... and I am at a loss  
just getting started.  Could you please point me to the best, latest  
documentation? I did read your recent release note, and last winter I  
watched a presentation of yours.

I am fairly new to squeak & pharo and I have not yet generated the  
VM's C code -- i don't where to begin to do that.
--
I am amazed, given the speed of these new computers, that squeak and  
pharo "feel sluggish" at all.

Also... are these current VM's 64 bit? And, is it easy to see the FFI  
code once I have generated the C?

Thanks in advance,
Cam

On Jul 6, 2009, at 5:31 PM, Bryce Kampjes wrote:

> Exupery itself may need a little more work before it's providing a
> practical performance improvement. It can speed up real code now,  
> and it
> will do better with a little tuning of the profiler that drives
> compilation.

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This link (http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/exupery/2008-November/000322.html 
) is fairly informative.. and i will keep digging around. I have been  
running Pharo exclusively in recent times, so I will need to see which  
version of squeak to get, etc.

-cam


On Jul 6, 2009, at 6:01 PM, Cameron Sanders wrote:

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On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 20:37 -0400, Cameron Sanders wrote:
> This link (http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/exupery/2008-November/000322.html 
> ) is fairly informative.. and i will keep digging around. I have been  
> running Pharo exclusively in recent times, so I will need to see which  
> version of squeak to get, etc.

Exupery's documentation is here:

     http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3842      Exupery                        
     http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5672      Building Exupery on Unix

There's documentation on the swiki (links above) on installing Exupery
which includes a pre-built image.

Exupery doesn't yet support the proper closure bytecodes. I'm going to
work on that after finishing the first stage of dynamic method inlining.

Bryce

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Thanks, I appreciate the links.

And, I must be having troubles with my Smart Mailboxes. As a result, I  
initially wasn't certain that this list was processing my original  
query, and so I posted on Pharo before I found your reply.

-Cam


On Jul 7, 2009, at 5:50 PM, Bryce Kampjes wrote:

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