From: "Benjamin J. Tilly" <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-04-25T04:46:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14172] Re: python on the smalltalk VM

Conrad Schneiker <schneik@austin.ibm.com> wrote:
>FYI: Thought this might be of interest to the JRuby and Ruby/GUI folks.
>
>What caught my eye was:
>
>> > Python is a big part for the execution engine, this is a new area. The
>> > Smalltalk VM runs Python 10 to 100x faster. {JMM I should point out the
>> > Perl and Python folks are working toward having/wanting/needing a
>> > universal VM}
>
>Can anyone shed light on the last sentence?
[...]

I don't know about Python, but Perl is looking to develop a model
where they have a VM into which they can plug multiple front ends,
and for which they can have multiple back-end implementations.
One of the front ends would look suspiciously like Perl5.  One of
the back ends would look suspiciously like a standard C
interpreter.

My suspicion is that the internals of this beast are going to be
modelled on some of the basic ideas of Perl today.  I rather doubt
that it will be overly friendly to radically different language
designs.  (I could be surprised.)

As for the rest of it, the Smalltalk VM has been through a lot
more work and optimization than most of the scripting languages.
Some of the best optimizations in the Java world come from
Smalltalk.  I am not surprised that those technologies would
apply to Python.  I am sure things like identifying code
hotspots at runtime and optimizing them on the fly would work
wonders for real Ruby programs as well.  (I am also sure that
it would be a lot of work, but less work if Ruby was largely
written in Ruby already.)

Cheers,
Ben