Strongtalk VM now open source

[Phil Tomson]

The Strongtalk is supposedly a very fast VM for Smalltalk. Now it's
been released as open source. Perhaps it would be possible to run
Ruby on it? Or perhaps some ideas can be borrowed to make YARV
faster?

http://www.strongtalk.org/

Phil

 

[Rick DeNatale]

The Strongtalk is supposedly a very fast VM for Smalltalk. Now it's
been released as open source. Perhaps it would be possible to run
Ruby on it? Or perhaps some ideas can be borrowed to make YARV
faster?

http://www.strongtalk.org/

Given the provenance (Dave Ungar's self group) at first glance this
looks promising, probably more promising in the long run than a JVM
implementation of Ruby.

 

[Dido Sevilla]

Given the provenance (Dave Ungar's self group) at first glance this
looks promising, probably more promising in the long run than a JVM
implementation of Ruby.

Self itself may be a mine of good ideas for making Ruby faster, the
language being just as dynamic and many of the same ideas they had for
making it faster (the best VM JIT compiler they've been able to come
up with is about half the speed of the equivalent C, which is not at
all bad) may be applicable to Ruby as well.

http://research.sun.com/self/compiler.html

 

[Paul Battley]

... except the JRuby implementation 1) is there, 2) is founded, 3)
runs on a gazillion of platforms. (AFAICS, they don't even manage to
compile their own Strongtalk source. ;-))

Strongtalk definitely needs a lot of work before it's useful to a
possible Ruby implementation.

But, sure, read the papers and see what can be done.

It's also not the first time someone has talked about running Ruby on
a Smalltalk VM on this list. Peter Suk's Alumina VM project seems to
be moribund, however.

As you say, the big benefit of JRuby is that it's already here and
working. That's definitely worth something.

Paul.