Sunday, September 16, 2007

More exupery

In Bryce's documentation (see the bibliography that I wrote about in my last post), he mentions PICs but as far as I could see never expands that acronym, well, I think I know what it is after browsing the source code:
Polymorphic Inline Cache

Squeak - Exupery

Well, I've been on a squeak kick for a while now.... I've done some work getting seaside doing some displaying of pictures and now I'm really pumped about a project I just discovered called: Exupery: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3842
I've just read the articles in the bibliography section: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5792
and now I've downloaded the source code and got the image running. I'd like to see what Bryce Kampjes' has done here in this project.

What's cool about this project is that Bryce thinks that with a bit of work on a background compiler with some aggressive inlining of code and some SSA optimizations he can achieve C-level performance with squeak smalltalk! Solving one of the most persistent complaints about Smalltalk that it is slow (certainly no where as slow as MRI) Post a comment if you can tell me what MRI stands for.