...or: Winning Ignorance
Excuse me, I'd like to talk about a small idea: creating a Squeak VM for Java Using the CCodeGenerator engine, I think would be not so difficult to generate a JavaCodeGenerator class for building java source code for the VM. We will have Squeak running in a JavaVM, perhaps a bit slowly. After a bit of working, we can try to integrate the java GC, JavaBeans and the Security concepts of Java into Squeak, generating a hybrid VM and the Smalltalk of the future.
A lot of java-students will look with interest to a Java-based implementation of Smalltalk, and start to download the SqueakVM....
This is only an idea. I know the efficency problem 'd be not so tiny and so I am only talking about it.... ...someone interested?
-- // Giovanni Giorgi e-mail: giovanni.giorgi@mlab.disco.unimi.it
// Master Thesis at http://mars.sal.disco.unimi.it/~giorgi // Student & (ex)Tutor at Depart. of Computer Science of Milan, Italy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------
..or: Winning Ignorance
Excuse me, I'd like to talk about a small idea: creating a Squeak VM for Java Using the CCodeGenerator engine, I think would be not so difficult to generate a JavaCodeGenerator class for building java source code for the VM. We will have Squeak running in a JavaVM, perhaps a bit slowly. After a bit of working, we can try to integrate the java GC, JavaBeans and the Security concepts of Java into Squeak, generating a hybrid VM and the Smalltalk of the future.
A lot of java-students will look with interest to a Java-based implementation of Smalltalk, and start to download the SqueakVM....
This is only an idea. I know the efficency problem 'd be not so tiny and so I am only talking about it.... ..someone interested?
Assuming that the CCodeGenerator generated Java Object rather than C, the net effect would be a bytecode interpreter for a dynamic language with garbage collection running a bytecode interpreter for a dynamic language with garbage collection. This can be expected to crawl -- for an example of what it would be like, run the Squeak inside Squeak interpreter simulator.
A similar, but far more successful task was JPython, an implementation of Python in Java. In that case, however, far more than a mere port of the preexisting bytecode generator was accomplished -- this was a complete rewrite which itself exploited the JPython object and memory model. I considered doing a parallel task, but it was not obvious how to avoid some of the deeper differences between the systems.
Earlier messages in this listServ announced the result of a working Smalltalk in Python. You may want to see what they have done to date before undertaking the task yourself.
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