Home

Welcome to the opensmalltalk-vm wiki!

The opensmalltalk-vm is a VM for Smalltalk and related languages. It is developed in Smalltalk. This repository holds the generated source from the Smalltalk development environment, the platform support sources, build directories, and source of the CI infrastructure that flesh out the pure Smalltalk development environment to produce a production-quality real-world Smalltalk VM. You can read more information on the full ecosystem at www.squeak.org.research (see the papers https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.2841 / https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3281287.3281295, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.2841, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3132190.3132201, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3139903.3139911, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754186). The Smalltalk source lives at http://source.squeak.org/@Lek8fo6SQy1Y4Mhh/iVRcogFI in package VMMaker-oscog. Scripts in the image directory in this repository build a Smalltalk development environment for the top of VMMaker-oscog.

These are some long-term and short-term ideas for what we might want to agree on and stabilize and push into the image. Some of these are far along, others are just ideas.

• productizing Sista; Sista is a Smalltalk take on speculative-inlining/adaptive optimizing, keeping the optimizer above the VM in line with Smalltalk tradition. The prototype has been evaluated, written up and is definitely viable. Resources have prevented full productization. This system should offer of the order of 3x to 4x performance increase with more to come when extended. This is a really challenging project.
• productizing the Threaded FFI; the Threaded FFI is an implementation of David Simmons' lock-free VM sharing architecture, where any thread can run the VM but only one thread can do so at any one time (multi-threaded but not in parallel). The prototype was functional in 2010 but again resources have prevented its productization. Since 2010 the arrival of Spur has provided facilities suited to the Threaded FFI, notably pinning.
• extending Spur with an incremental mark-sweep collector and an incremental compactor; Spur is the most advanced memory manager/object representation for Smalltalk ever. It provides fast become that scales to gigabyte heaps while retaining direct pointers (no object table indirection per object; object pointers point directly to objects which have a conventional compact contiguous header-followed-by-slots layout). This is done by reusing the dynamic message send lookup machinery to identify forwarding pointers, snd the context-to-stack-mapping machinery's stack zone, to ensure that within an activation no read barriers are required to access an object, while objects are becalmed by turning them into forwarding pointers to copies, scanning only the very small stack zone to eliminate forwarding pointers. This scheme has been extended to do incremental compaction in multi-gigabyte heaps. The incremental scan-mark collector to accompany the incremental collector still needs implementing (design sketches exist). So again the project involves productizing a reasonably well-understood architecture.