April 2010 - Tachyon-list - mailman.iro.umontreal.ca

Re: [Tachyon-list] Inspiration: Self Klein's Metacircular Virtual Machine Kit
by Erick Lavoie 02 May '10

02 May '10

Oups, did a private reply to mark. Mark is there a way to set the "reply-to" field of the mailing list to the mailing list itself? Thanks -------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Tachyon-list] Inspiration: Self Klein's Metacircular Virtual Machine Kit Date : Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:48:05 -0400 De : Erick Lavoie <erick.lavoie(a)gmail.com> Pour : Marc Feeley <feeley(a)iro.umontreal.ca> There is still a couple of things that worries me. Given that they were mostly three working on Klein and that they never achieve a level of performance similar to their C++ implementation, I feel that the problem of boostrapping a system efficiently (in terms of development time) to achieve both simplicity and performance is not completely understood and therefore risky. What I get from the paper, is that tools for inspecting and debugging the VM are of paramount importance but can be really tricky to get right. That's something we should take into account in planning the work ahead. At this point, I find it really hard to assess the amount of work in front of us. I can't completely nail it yet, but there is something that makes meta-circular implementation of live systems a lot harder to think about than plain layered systems with different "languages" for each of the layers. To be successful, I think we will have to learn as much as we can from other projects. Talking about tools, I think the Maxine VM inspector is really interesting. http://wikis.sun.com/display/MaxineVM/Inspector Still interesting to note that Sun lost interest in the Klein project but still kept the idea of meta-cicularity... Erick Le 29/04/10 19:30 , Marc Feeley a écrit : > Nice find Erick. Well what can I say... the reasons they mention for Klein being metacircular are pretty much what I was saying for Tachyon. > > Marc > > > On 2010-04-29, at 5:16 PM, Erick Lavoie wrote: > > >> "In constructing Klein, we have attempted to adhere to various principles, including object-orientation, metacircularity, heavy code reuse, reactiveness, and mirror-based reflection. We expect these principles to yield many benefits, including: >> • A simpler, more malleable VM (because it is written almost entirely in a high-level language). >> • Less replicated code (because the VM and the applications running on top of it are written in the same language and can share code, as can the VM and its development environment). >> • Better performance (because the VM will be able to do optimizations across the entire code base, including the VM code itself - imagine being able to inline the hotspots of the VM right up into an application). >> • Faster turnaround when making changes to the VM (because the VM will no longer be tied to C++ and its compilation system)." >> http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/ >> >> However, the current version is not complete yet as a lot of things are yet to be done. >> >> Erick >> _______________________________________________ >> Tachyon-list mailing list >> Tachyon-list(a)iro.umontreal.ca >> https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/tachyon-list >> > >

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Inspiration: Self Klein's Metacircular Virtual Machine Kit
by Erick Lavoie 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

"In constructing Klein, we have attempted to adhere to various principles, including object-orientation, metacircularity, heavy code reuse, reactiveness, and mirror-based reflection. We expect these principles to yield many benefits, including: * A simpler, more malleable VM (because it is written almost entirely in a high-level language). * Less replicated code (because the VM and the applications running on top of it are written in the same language and can share code, as can the VM and its development environment). * Better performance (because the VM will be able to do optimizations across the entire code base, including the VM code itself - imagine being able to inline the hotspots of the VM right up into an application). * Faster turnaround when making changes to the VM (because the VM will no longer be tied to C++ and its compilation system)." http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/ However, the current version is not complete yet as a lot of things are yet to be done <http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/todo.html>. Erick

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FWD: SquirrelFish Introduction post
by Erick Lavoie 28 Apr '10

28 Apr '10

http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/

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Fwd: [Fwd: [Sugar-devel] resource for understanding git]
by Erick Lavoie 28 Apr '10

28 Apr '10

-------- Message original -------- Sujet: [Fwd: [Sugar-devel] resource for understanding git] Date : Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:47:45 -0500 De : Erick Lavoie <erick.lavoie(a)gmail.com> Pour : sugar-narratives(a)googlegroups.com

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LINK: Delayed Code Generation for Smalltalk-80
by Erick Lavoie 27 Apr '10

27 Apr '10

"This thesis argues and demonstrates that it is possible to compile Smalltalk-80 directly into machine code for stock hardware, and to do this efﬁciently in terms of both compiler performance (the compiler must be small and fast) and generated code performance. The techniques developed for ‘delayed code generation’ in single-pass recursive descent compilation (or code generation by walking a parse tree) are appli- cable to almost any language, and some discussion of the application of delayed code generation to the compilation of C is also presented." http://www-sor.inria.fr/publi/DCG_piumarta-thesis.html I'll be looking at this and I'll try to find interesting techniques that could be applicable to our project. Erick

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Hello
by Marc Feeley 27 Apr '10

27 Apr '10

Welcome to the Tachyon JavaScript compiler mailing list. The list is meant for developers, and eventually users, of the Tachyon compiler. The list is being archived and is public, so please post messages in english to make the content easily accessible to everyone. Long live Tachyon! Marc Feeley

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WebKit
by Marc Feeley 27 Apr '10

27 Apr '10

Maxime, do you think you can give us a quick overview of the WebKit at this wednesday's meeting? Can we all meet at 10AM in my office? Marc

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