Posted by Alexandre Jasmin-2 on Mar 07, 2011; 12:29pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Kernel-tp3335157p3338856.html

>> Your image helps me a lot.
>>
>> I'm trying to get the Squeak VM compiling with Adobe Alchemy.
>
> tell us more :)

I'm exploring ways to use Smalltalk inside a web page.

There are already few interesting Javascript converters and Smalltalk
inspired projects like the Clamato and the Lively Kernel. But it'd be
nice to run unchanged code from Pharo or Squeak directly.

The simplest way to bring Pharo on the web would be to run the existing VM
inside a web page. The Squeak plug-in does that already but good luck
getting anyone to install it.

There are at least two solutions aiming to bring native code to the web
without installing plug-ins
 - Google Native Client provides a sandboxed environment for x86 code
 - Alchemy (a research project at Adobe) compiles C into the bytecode
language interpreted by Flash.

Since Flash seems to have wider adoption than Native Client I'm doing a
little experiment with it. I just took the VMMaker generated C code for
the Squeak VM and passed it through the Alchemy compiler to get something
that runs on top of the Flash plug-in.

It's too soon to tell if this kind of nested VM is really usable.
Performance will undoubtedly be an issue but I can at least run the Hazel
image and have it beep in a loop which is encouraging.

It seems Flash also supports some dynamic class loading which could
enable performance improvements but the execution model while a bit
better than Javascript doesn't really compare with Smalltalk. I don't see
how we could support continuations for the debugger with pure AVM bytecode
for instance. Anyways just recompiling the existing interpreter with
Alchemy compiler requires a minimum of work so I'm focusing on that now.

Will let you know how it goes.