2014-09-15 14:39 GMT+02:00 Cl�ment Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com>:
Hello,

Note that slang is a subset of smalltalk. The Slang compiler does not allow to compile smalltalk to C. It allows to compile a smalltalk with restricted message sends and classes to C.

Yes, I am aware of that. I remember that from the very beginnings of Squeak.

Wasn't Smalltalk/X the one which had a more complete version of that C translation? I did an internship in a French company who had a Smalltalk to C translator done for them a long time ago.
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2014-09-15 13:28 GMT+02:00 Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com>:
Hi Phil,

thanks for the update on Slang to C. Allways significant to have that.

Two open questions:

- would a slang to x86 asm via NativeBoost be doable / a nice target?

Yes it would be interesting. However, by having a Slang to C compiler, we're platform-independent, we can compile the C code to x86, x86_64 and ARM quite easily (some part of the VM are already processor dependent, but not so much). Targeting direct machine code implies evolving the Slang compiler for each new assembly code we support. It sounds like a lot of engineering work compared to our resources and the gain.

It would allow JIT-type compilation experiments than a Slang-to-C chain isn't designed for :) With a lot more work doing the various NB ports, of course.
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- would targetting LLVM-IR be of interest?

If you compile the C code with Clang instead of gcc, which starts to be the case because of the lack of support for gcc in the latest Mac OS X, you are already using LLVM IR because Clang uses it. As the VM use the GNU C extensions to improve performance, I do not think that targeting directly the LLVM IR would greatly improve performance. So it sounds like quite some engineering work for no gain.

I would not suggest replacing C by LLVM-IR for VM work, in part because LLVM-IR is not what I would call a readable source code format... But I do know that even when doing C to C rewritting for embedded compilation, there is some low-level code that you can't write in C.
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However, I think Ronie was interested in doing such work. If he succeeds and reports performance improvement, then we can consider using his compiler to compile the VM.

Keep us posted!

Thierry