Andreas Raab wrote:

I think a project like this would need some champion. Having a Strongtalk VM would be wonderful but it's likely to be a lot of work and if I look around I don't see a lot of people with spare time at their disposal.

What if we had a technical lead in the Squeak VM community that could lead a Sun sponsored group (of 1 or 2). The work could be delineated in large chunks - defined in such a way that the work could be done by several people, at different times. Part-time Squeakers answer tough questions about Squeak and even code here and there - but most of the coding is done by Sun. If organized and planned in chunks, maybe it could be done little by little. More cost would go into the planning of the project. We'd need to know exactly the status of the current code and how hard it would be to organize it to start a project.

In this scenario, the Sun team, who understands the code better, can pass the code knowledge onto the Squeaker(s) that are leading the team. That way, the Squeak community acquires the knowledge needed to maintain the code. The squeakers can pass knowledge about the inner workings of Squeak to Sun.

Granted it would be using the workhorse of this "speculative" Sun team.

The Squeak Foundation could sponsor the "open source" initiative (website, tracking, server space). What chance is there of getting Sun to contribute? What can Squeak contribute back to Sun in exchange? If Sun can't contribute manpower, can they contribute funding to the Squeak Foundation to put toward experienced coders?

brad

David Griswold wrote:

...

Hi Squeak VMers,

I would like to start a dialog about the possiblity of joining forces, perhaps with the goal of producing a version of the Strongtalk VM for Squeak. Our problem over here is that the release of the VM source isn't very well timed, since no one from the original Strongtalk team has the time or inclination to support a full-blown open source effort to get the whole Strongtalk system finished and usable as a separate version of Smalltalk. It may turn out that Gilad Bracha can get some Sun funding to get a few VM engineers going on it, but that is speculation at this point. Personally, I just want to follow the fastest path to getting an open-source Smalltalk with this VM technology out there. If there is enough interest from Squeak VM-land, I would prefer to refocus energy from the Strongtalk community towards helping get Squeak up and running on our VM, porting it, etc.

What is the thinking in Squeak-land about this?

Cheers, Dave

tim Rowledge wrote:

Damn mail system refuses to send mail to this address.... unless this gets through

it did

Hi Craig,

- I wouldn't dream of proposing that Squeak dump its self-hosting properties. In the short term, I think a better approach would be to factor out some kind of common VM interface so that people can plug-in whichever VM they want.

In the medium term, porting Strongtalk can be done more easily by starting with just the interpreter and no compiler; the system runs just fine that way, and then all the really complicated stuff like deoptimization etc can be deferred.

In the long term, it would be great to rewrite the Strongtalk VM to be self-hosting and self-debugging. I had wanted to at least consider this from the beginning (all that C++ makes me wince too), but I was dissuaded by the VM guys as it is very much a research topic and we were trying to develop a commercial product. The performance of the VM in Strongtalk (especially the interpreter and compiler) is critical to achieving decent startup times without noticeable compilation pauses, so at the very least the host VM must be compiled into some very efficient form. The Squeak approach of translating a minimal subset to C might help make that possible. But it would be a huge project to rewrite the VM in Smalltalk, best done as research somewhere.

- I haven't looked at Exupery. I'd have to look to comment. Performance is as I have said the critical element, and having a huge chunk of time for some talented people to do it, which is always the problem.

- As for work, I am working on my own right now, and so have no ability to hire (and hardly any time to even fiddle with Strongtalk). If Gilad Bracha, who is the only one still at Sun, manages to get resources to hire people to work on this (I wouldn't bet on it given Sun's situation and attitude towards Smalltalk), that might be a possibility. BTW, something like Spoon might be a good candidate for the first port of Squeak to the Strongtalk VM, if it has a smaller set of demands on the VM.

Dave

-----Original Message----- From: Craig Latta [mailto:craig.at.netjam.org@david.griswold.at.squeak-vm-dev.at.avidriswo ld.mailshell.com] Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 10:47 PM To: David.Griswold.at.squeak-vm-dev@avidriswold.mailshell.com Cc: Squeak Virtual Machine Development Discussion Subject: re: Strongtalk VM for Squeak?

Hi Dave--

  I would love to see the StrongTalk ideas incorporated into Squeak,

but I'd never want to give up Squeak's wonderful self-hosting property (the virtual machine is written in Smalltalk, and runnable and debuggable in Smalltalk). All the C++ associated with the current StrongTalk makes me wince. :)

  Another current Squeak project, Bryce Kampjes' "Exupery", a

physical-processor code translator, manages to maintain this property. Could we do this with the StrongTalk ideas? Is there some useful overlap between StrongTalk and Exupery? (Others please feel free to chime in.)

  This also seems like a good time to mention that I'm looking for

work and that I have extensive experience with the Squeak VM (see, for example, my "Spoon" project, a minimal Squeak[1]).

  thanks!

-C

[1] http://rd.mailshell.com/netjam.org/spoon

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