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From: jsgray@watdragon.UUCP (Jan Gray)
Newsgroups: net.lang.st80
Subject: Re: Native code Smalltalk compilers
Message-ID: <978@watdragon.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 23:04:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdrago.978
Posted: Mon May 12 23:04:31 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 13-May-86 08:27:24 EDT
References: <418@vger.UUCP>
Reply-To: jsgray@watdragon.UUCP (Jan Gray)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 34
Keywords: smalltalk compiler optimizing native
Summary: 

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