SOAR: Smalltalk without bytecodes

1986; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 21; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/960112.28708

ISSN

1558-1160

Autores

A. Dain Samples, David Ungar, Paul Hilfinger,

Tópico(s)

Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Resumo

We have implemented Smalltalk-80 on an instruction-level simulator for a RISC microcomputer called SOAR. Measurements suggest that even a conventional computer can provide high performance for Smalltalk-80 by abandoning the 'Smalltalk Virtual Machine' in favor of compiling Smalltalk directly to SOAR machine code, linearizing the activation records on the machine stack, eliminating the object table, and replacing reference counting with a new technique called Generation Scavenging. In order to implement these techniques, we had to find new ways of hashing objects, accessing often-used objects, invoking blocks, referencing activation records, managing activation record stacks, and converting the virtual machine images.

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