Posted by
Stéphane Ducasse on
Mar 07, 2011; 8:17pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Kernel-tp3335157p3339878.html
On Mar 7, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Alexandre Jasmin wrote:
>>> 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
We would love to have somebody working on the google native client for pharo.
> - 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.
Ok now I understand.
>
> 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.
Fascinating!
> 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.
Thanks a lot.
Ben is already really happy to see 3 or 4 months of works been used by somebody else.
It is a great feedback.
Stef