From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2001-10-15T12:44:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22545] Re: Ruby conference postscripting

Hi,

"Robert Feldt" <feldt@ce.chalmers.se> wrote:

> Anyone has located info about the Animorphic Smalltalk VM? I searched but
> couldn't find "hard facts" mostly discussion on how fast it is etc.
>
> It seems to me that its a precursor to the Java Hotspot VM which from what
> I've heard (I left Java prior to its arrival) does *NOT* show very
> impressive performance. Can someone refute or support this impression?

I found lots of discussions (see some snippets below), but few hard facts. I
think making such information practically obtainable is one of the main
reasons for the petition.

Why don't you try asking on comp.lang.smalltalk?

Conrad

========

(http://brain.cs.uiuc.edu/StWritersCoop/Topics+having+found+authors)

"Animorphic Smalltalk: The animorphic Smalltalk is still today (more than 5
years after its baught by SUN and the end of the project) one of the most
interesting Smalltalk. Besides having the fastest VM, it is based on Mixins,
incorporate a type system, new thought about Smalltalk GUI, recomposition of
reflective Smalltalk aspects. Gilad Bracha gilad.bracha@eng.sun.com promised
to write a chapter on this amazing Smalltalk."

(http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/archive/msg00077.html)

"The Self group started out at Stanford.  They later
     moved to Sun.  Then, they formed a company
     Animorphic, to commercialize the technology.
     (Apparently, they got the memory consumption back
     down to a reasonable level.)  But, before they
     could, they were bought by Sun.  Sun's HotSpot
     compiler for Java is supposed to be based on
     this technology."

(http://lampwww.epfl.ch/events.html)

"A High Performance Mixin Implementation (Gilad Bracha, Sun Microsystems)"

"We describe the use and implementation of mixins in the Animorphic
Smalltalk system, a high performance Smalltalk virtual machine and
programming environment. Mixins are the basic unit of implementation, and
are directly supported by the VM. At the language level, code can be defined
either in mixins or in classes, but classes are merely sugar for mixin
definition and application. The Strongtalk type system supports the optional
static typechecking of mixins in an encapsulated manner. Mixins are used at
key points in the library. The system is the fastest Smalltalk
implementation to date, typically three times faster than other Smalltalk
implementations. Gilad Bracha received his Ph.D. 1992 from the University of
Utah. He is now with Sun Microsystems where he worked on the specifications
of the Java Programming Language and the Java Virtual Machine. He is
currently the specification lead for an effort to extend the language to
support generic types."