2010/7/29 Eliot Miranda <[email protected]>

>
>
> 2010/7/29 Mariano Martinez Peck <[email protected]>
>
> Hi folks. Hope Eliot is reading this thread.
>>
>
> Yes, I'm reading :)
>


THanks Eliot for all the answers. It seems they are all good news :)


>
>
>> It is time to think in Pharo 1.2 and we need to discuss if we want to have
>> CogVM as the standard Pharo VM.
>>
>> Most of us have tried it and found it incredible fast. So it would be very
>> good to take advantage of it.  But I think there are a couple of things to
>> be discussed:
>>
>> 1) Cog VM seems to be aimed for x86 and 32 bits. You can read Eliot
>> quotes:
>> "The Cog VM is a just-in-time compiler that currently supports only x86
>>
>
> It is only initially aimed at x86.  That's the most important platform by
> far from Teleplace's perspective and I suspect the majority of the community
> is on x86.  But Cog was designed form the outset to be portable.  The Cogit
> is architected to support other ISAs.  See CogAbstractInstruction and its
> one subclass CogIA32Compiler.  To port to another ISA you should
> subclass CogAbstractInstruction and implement the same protocol
> as CogIA32Compiler.
>
> I would love to see a CogARMCompiler and a CogPPCCompiler and encourage
> anyone with low-level expertise on those platforms to have a go.  I'm always
> here to answer questions.
>
>
>
This is great Eliot.  I thought that Cog was completly aimed to x86 and that
would be difficult to port. That was my concern, but now with what you said
it is much clear :)




> No effort has been made to maintain 64-bit compatibility.  Apologies, this
>> was unaffordable."
>>
>> So...how much important is this for us? do we care? and if we want to do
>> it, is it "doable" ?  is it less doable than the normal squeak VM ?
>>
>> I really would like to have 64bits VM + 64bits images in a near
>> future...but hat's just my thoguhts.
>>
>
> I'm also thinking abut 64-bits but want to do 64-bits with a new object
> representation based on my 64-bit objrep for VisualWorks, which would
> include SmallFloat.  Realistically this is a year out, because the 32-bit
> version of the new objrep and the pinning GC need to be implemented before
> I'll be able to do a 64-bit VM.  But it's an obvious and logical direction
> to go in.
>


Excellent!!   Just by curious, your idea, or what you did in VW, was to be
able to put SmallFloats directly inside the address ? just like we do
nowadays with SmallInteger ?



>
> 2) The status of the external plugins. Are they working with Cog ?  Not
>> only the "core plugings" but FFI, OSProcess (I read some problems with it),
>> TrueType, etc...
>>
>
> ReentrantFFIPlugin (a.k.a. src/plugins/SqueakFFIPrims/SqueakFFIPrims.c)
> should work.  But people need to build and test.
>
> 3) Is it stable for production use?  For example, I read that with seaside
>> there are some crashes.
>>
>
> Well, it is the production VM at Teleplace so at least for one context the
> answer is certainly yes.  There must be something obviously broken with
> sockets (is it all platforms or only linux?) because we use sockets
> intensively at Teleplace and only see problems on a single customer's
> machine which looks to be to do with virus protection.  I'm on holiday next
> week and am rather busy right now, but perhaps later in August I can work
> with Lukas to try and sort out the socket issues.
>

ok...


>
> 4) Depends on heroes. I never liked this idea. It has nothing to do with
>> Eliot. He is very cool and helpful. But I wonder, do we understand the new
>> VM and the changes? are we able to handle and fix it even without eliot ?
>>
>
> THis is a serious issue.  I need to be nagged to document the system on my
> blog.  I mean to get to this (perhaps in September?).  Alas a Smalltalk JIT
> is a complex beast, significantly more complex than the interpreter, and is
> not the easiest thing to understand or debug.  So even if it is well
> documented it'll be more difficult to fix than the interpreter, but that's a
> price one has to pay for this kind of performance.
>
>

I agree. That's why my concern.



>
>> 5) Integration to VMMaker. I saw that they started to merge cog (actually,
>> I think only stack vm?) to the trunk of VMMaker. This is really good news. I
>> hope everything is there and merged.
>>
>
> Cog is a fork of VMMaker.  We may be able to merge at some stage, and Cog's
> Slang should still work with the old Interpreter.  But for now, inevitably,
> it's a fork.  I needed to add a lot of functionality to Slang to write Cog,
> and I didn't have the cycles to keep Interpreter up to date.  That's life :)
>
>
ok



> 6) Binaries. It seems the official released didn't come with binaries. So
>> we should compile it for each OS.
>>
>
> There is /no/ official release.   Until Cog has stabilized and the VM
> maintainers have taken it up it's definitely unoffficial :)
>

Ok...forget the "official" word....where should we get the sources (svn) and
the VMMaker code in order to compile the latest and build binaries?



>
> Ok..that's all my thoughts. I would really like to have a discussion here
>> and see what to do.....grrrrrr you are all in holidays, aren't you? hahah
>>
>
> two days to go :)
>


enjoy ;)



>
>
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Mariano
>>
>
> best
> Eliot
>
>
>>
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