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Tejaswi · Guest

Hi,

I was interested in knowing if there has been any effort to design a
Smalltalk processor( a silicon implementation of the virtual machine -
something like Sun's Picojava which was modelled on the JVM). Any
information about any effort, or literature will be of great help. Any
other information about other implementaions of object-oriented
processors, is also very useful to me. Thank You.

Tejaswi

Jason Ozolins · Guest

Tejaswi wrote:

Tejaswi · Guest

I was actually trying to update myself on all the developments in this
field, and anything else that can be done to improve it.

Tejaswi

Larry Elmore · Guest

Tejaswi wrote:

Tommy Thorn · Guest

Google is your friend. I know Jecel Assumpcao Jr has written a lot about
it (I don't what he has implemented). See www.merlintec.com

The important concepts of a Smalltalk "processor"/VM are: argument
passing mechanism, method dispatch, and object creation (consing).
You'll find that the support needed for other dynamic languages (eg.
Lisp and Scheme) overlap to a large extent. In fact, a machine for
either would probably be close to what is needed for a lazy functional
language. Perhaps Prolog even.

Of course, projects such as SOAR (Smalltalk On A Risc), which spawned
Sun's SPARC, suggested that an efficient implementation could be had
with only minimal modifications to a general purpose RISC (though I
wonder if a message lookup cache wouldn't help a bit).

Don't expect to find much revolutionary in the literature. Most design
are pretty straightforward, but the good news is that you can quite
easily implement your own with even an entry-level FPGA development kit.
I'm sure it will be a lot of fun.

Tommy

Tejaswi wrote:

Ian Rogers · Guest

From February 2005 there's a paper from Sun labs describing replacing
addresses on buses with object identifiers:
http://research.sun.com/techrep/2005/abstract-143.html
This would likely aid smalltalk, but it is described in the context of Java.

Ian Rogers
(also interested in hearing of other new innovations in h/w for
object-oriented languages)

Tejaswi wrote:

JJ · Guest

Hi Tejaswi

I've been working on a Transputer (occam-CSP) inspired FPGA processor
that include hardware memory management support for objects and
processes. In fact processes without objects would be pretty hard.

It strikes me that one could build other unusual processors out of this
by exploiting the memory structure and Lisp, Smalltalk comes to mind.

In other words, build a memory that can sustain maximum fully random
access rates across entire address space, then feed those to a no of
fairly simple multi threaded processors. This is the reverse of
building fastest single threaded cpu with cache hierarchy and
consequent memory wall.

I will be giving a paper on it at cpa2005 Eindhoven in September so it
will be available at wotug.org later. See also comp.sys.transputer for
anouncement.

Regards

transputer2 .. yahoo ...
johnjakson .. usa ...

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