Sqeak VM (was [rescue] Mozilla Firefox)

[William Barnett-Lewis]

> On Apr 22, 2004, at 1:36 PM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>>   I wish I knew why it
>> crawled so slowly on my Octane (Squeak runs nicely on a Pentium 166, 
>> but
>> it crawls on my R10k @ 250mhz).
> 
>    They're probably tuning it for one architecture at the expense of 
> another...x86 assembler helpers, cache friendliness, who knows.

There is essentially no per machine optimization. The VM is written in 
Smalltalk however it does need a certain amount of C to bootstrap it. 
This C is generated by Smalltalk in a running VM and is the same for all 
platforms. The last big change I remember was to make it bug compatible 
with gcc...

More details here: 
ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html

The real difference is probably in whatever C compiler that a given VM 
maintainer is using. If it's VC++ on windog vs. gcc on Irix then that 
will explain the difference to my satisfaction.

William
-- 
Live like you will never die, love like you've never been hurt, dance
like no-one is watching.
				Alex White