🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <418@vger.UUCP> rob@vger.UUCP (Rob Field) writes:
>I am interested in writing a highly optimized native code compiler
>for Smalltalk.  Does anyone know about work that has been done
>in this area, compilers that have been written, articles published
>relevant to this,... 

The Berkeley SOAR (Smalltalk On A RISC) runs specially compiled
code (as opposed to virtual machine bytecodes).  [Aside: Would
someone from the SOAR project care to comment on project status?]

Peter Deutsch's "PS" implementation translates and caches virtual
machine bytecodes into native 68000 code.  As far as I know it is
the fastest ST-80 implementation (110% of a Dorado on a SUN-3).

Bob Atkinson (BAtkinson.pa@XEROX.ARPA) has written a native compiler,
but you should get in contact with him for details.

There will probably be a few papers on this subject at the upcoming
OOPSLA conference.


References:

L.P. Deutsch and A.M.Schiffman, Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80
System, Procedings of the 11th Annual ACM SIGACT News-SIGPLAN Notices
Symposium on the Principles of Programming Languages, Salt Lake City, Utah,
January, 1984.

D. Ungar, et al, Architecture of SOAR: Smalltalk on a RISC, Eleventh Annual
International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Ann Arbor, MI, June 1984.


"Making slow progress at bringing up BSII on the Atari ST",
Jan Gray