FWIW, I'd love to have a working Pharo bytecode interpreter that works. VMMaker currently doesn't have one it seems (earlier experiments didn't worked for me).

I am very interested with the VM, read the blue book, understand the primitives, can somewhat read bytecode but what is needed now is the ability to run/debug a VM inside Pharo itself. GDB'ing is okay but a pain in the ass to understand what's going on. 

Also read the Tour of the OE of Tim Rowledge and Porting the VM etc. 

Also looked at the VMMaker package (Interpreter and Object Memory) + Slang.

Now, getting an working interpreter would help me reach the next step. I am not talking about the Stack interpreter, but the plain Interpreter.

Any plans?

Phil

---

Philippe Back

Dramatic Performance Improvements

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On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:33 PM, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> wrote:

On Nov 26, 2013, at 1:21 PM, phil@highoctane.be wrote:

I downloaded ST/X this morning and looked around for a couple hours.

Impressive system. And impressive clients list/activities etc.

<rant>

And wow, Claus is yet another individual with top notch computer chops... Seems that this community has the highest density of high perf brains. I feel humbled indeed.

</rant>

What struck me was the speed.

15 years of working improving the VM pays off.

This is why the work of Eliot on Spur are also important. What is also important is that more people can work on the VM

for cleaning it so that we get a documented and good vehicule.

And this will take time. We are working on a prototype to get forced to think about VM and learn. But this prototype will 

not replace Cog in the near future. So we should be happy that cog is there and improving.

Stef

Pharo really needs a huge speedup on the UI front. I am using a top of the line desktop system and still Pharo sometimes feels slow (some is due to algorithms - like the finder tool taking ages for a lot of things, but some is due to the UI system).

This is not linked to the VM, as the MVC projects in Squeak are uber fast.

Is the Text rewrite going to have an impact on this?

On the front of interoperability, I personally have chosen to go the RabbitMQ route, it allows me to wire all kinds of things together with some room for scale.

On the Java front itself, in the TCL community, we do have tclbend and also a package to do the same thing as STX:LIBJAVA. Truth be told, there hasn't been much traction in there. It works fine but that's it. http://www2.tcl.tk/1313 - usage sample http://www2.tcl.tk/14919

It also has fell behind in terms of keeping up with the latest versions of the environment.

In PHP, there is the Quercus and Caucho Resin Server that allows to run PHP on top of the JVM and invoke Java from there. Some people run very fast stuff on that, and benefiting from all JEE abilities (JMS, JTA, Clustering, JAAS...) is really nice.  http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.1/doc/quercus.xtp

Phil

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Jan Vrany <jan.vrany@fit.cvut.cz> wrote:

On 26/11/13 10:40, Serge Stinckwich wrote:

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Jan Vrany <jan.vrany@fit.cvut.cz> wrote:

On 26/11/13 03:28, askoh wrote:

Bravo Jan and your collaborators. You have done it.

Thanks.

Anything preventing STX:LIBJAVA from being used in production
environments?

Good question. STX:LIBJAVA is still a research phase. However, if everything
goes fine, we might have first project using it for real
in couple months.

What is important is also the licence. Do you use an open-source licence ?

Strictly speaking - no. For various, historical reasons.

The Smalltalk part STX:LIBJAVA support code is available under
the same terms as Smalltalk/X itself [1].

The code of the VM is not publicly available for various reasons,
though it is possible to get an access. Ask Claus Gittinger if
you're interested in details.

Anything preventing Pharo and VisualWorks for using the technology also?

Short answer: Time and money.
The way we did it requires significant changes to the virtual machine
(as we believe this is the only way to get a decent performance). Indeed, if
somebody going to pay for it, everything's possible ;-)

You should try to ask ESUG about financial support.

Maybe I should. But frankly - how many people in this community are like "That would be great, I need this feature!" Raise hands. :-)

Cheers, Jan

[1] http://www.exept.de/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/stx/README?view=markup