I know a lot of these people personally. Heck, I theoretically share(d) an office with one. And of course the way that Self's technology made it to Java's HotSpot, which is still tons faster than any JS, was via Anamorphic and Strongtalk.
Higher performance VM/compiler technology was not enabled by Self's object model, it was necessitated by it. The system was just too slow otherwise.
Squeak was never intended as a high performance Smalltalk implementation, it had different goals. When Squeak was created, an automatically generated bytecode VM was already tons faster than the fastest high-performance Smalltalk computers the creators had worked with at PARC, in particular the Dorado. This was considered more than fast enough for what they were trying to do, in particular because the bulk multi-media processing would be done by plugins (also often generated). Making a JIT for better performance was a non-goal.
So using Squeak (and later OpenSmalltalk) as a comparison is just completely invalid.
The Cog VM was started around 15 years after that, by a Smalltalk VM engineer who had already worked on jitted VMs professionally.
I don't understand in what respect this should contradict my statements. I answered to the argument "Several trillion dollar companies have large teams working on JavaScript engines, usually multiple engines each. The OpenSmalltalk VM is a volunteer effort of a very small community, with the main JIT produced primarily by a single person." and demonstrated that major performance breakthroughs were realized by small teams, in case of JS as we know by Lars Bak (who also was at Longview Tech) and Kasper Lund. Of course there were other attempts to make Smalltalk faster, but I concentrated on the ones really making a difference. I think the topic has been sufficiently discussed.
Yes, it is obvious that you don’t understand. Not sure how that is possible, but here we are.
Your claim that Smalltalk is somehow more difficult to optimize than JS or Self is patently false.
The fact that you get different results from large teams of super smart people with virtually unlimited resources than from small bands of volunteers is in no way contradicted by individuals making breakthroughs. Those individuals often work at those multi-trillion companies.
Using either SOM or Squeak/Pharo as comparisons for VM performance is ridiculous.
Comments
Really, no.
I know a lot of these people personally. Heck, I theoretically share(d) an office with one. And of course the way that Self's technology made it to Java's HotSpot, which is still tons faster than any JS, was via Anamorphic and Strongtalk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot_(virtual_machine)
https://strongtalk.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongtalk
https://gist.github.com/landonf/9053062
But of course Smalltalk was jitted long before that, with Peter Deutsch's VM.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800017.800542
Higher performance VM/compiler technology was not enabled by Self's object model, it was necessitated by it. The system was just too slow otherwise.
Squeak was never intended as a high performance Smalltalk implementation, it had different goals. When Squeak was created, an automatically generated bytecode VM was already tons faster than the fastest high-performance Smalltalk computers the creators had worked with at PARC, in particular the Dorado. This was considered more than fast enough for what they were trying to do, in particular because the bulk multi-media processing would be done by plugins (also often generated). Making a JIT for better performance was a non-goal.
So using Squeak (and later OpenSmalltalk) as a comparison is just completely invalid.
The Cog VM was started around 15 years after that, by a Smalltalk VM engineer who had already worked on jitted VMs professionally.
http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/microbio/
And so using the Cog VM as some sort of benchmark as the "first fast" Smalltalk implementation is completely unrelated to reality.
I don't understand in what respect this should contradict my statements. I answered to the argument "Several trillion dollar companies have large teams working on JavaScript engines, usually multiple engines each. The OpenSmalltalk VM is a volunteer effort of a very small community, with the main JIT produced primarily by a single person." and demonstrated that major performance breakthroughs were realized by small teams, in case of JS as we know by Lars Bak (who also was at Longview Tech) and Kasper Lund. Of course there were other attempts to make Smalltalk faster, but I concentrated on the ones really making a difference. I think the topic has been sufficiently discussed.
Yes, it is obvious that you don’t understand. Not sure how that is possible, but here we are.
Your claim that Smalltalk is somehow more difficult to optimize than JS or Self is patently false.
The fact that you get different results from large teams of super smart people with virtually unlimited resources than from small bands of volunteers is in no way contradicted by individuals making breakthroughs. Those individuals often work at those multi-trillion companies.
Using either SOM or Squeak/Pharo as comparisons for VM performance is ridiculous.
‘Nuff said.
I don't feed trolls, I'm out.