[Vm-dev] Pypy-Squeak VM generation news

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Mon Oct 22 21:39:15 UTC 2007

Michael Haupt wrote:
> On 10/22/07, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
>>> My guess is it's "use the PyPy *tool chain* to generate a Squeak VM".
>> And what exactly does *that* mean? Rewrite the code generator in Python
>> to generate C code from Slang? Rewrite the VM in Python? Use PyPy
>> translation tools to generate code from Squeak parse trees? There are so
>> many possible ways of "using tools" ...
> it means (simplified) rewriting the VM in Python and compiling it
> using the PyPy tool chain.

How interesting! I'm very curious about the results. There are at least 
two areas where I could see some interesting outcomes:

1) How to write a Squeak VM that actually consists of objects. This will 
be interesting since I've always felt that it shouldn't really be all 
that hard to drop the limitations of the code generator (after all, 
Ian's entire work is based on a comparable approach) so it'll be 
interesting to see what the structure of this VM will be.

2) Performance comparisons. It should be interesting to see how a PyPy 
VM compares in benchmarks, either for improving PyPy (or learning how 
and why a Squeak VM is different than for example a Python VM) or what 
to do to make the C Squeak VM faster. This should be in particular 
relevant if PyPy does some dataflow analysis which we've never run on 
the Slang code.

   - Andreas

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