When you say you are porting the Pharo VM for Solaris 11 and Sparc/x86, you mean you are adding support for the Sparc ABI for FFI calls and a Sparc back-end to the JIT ? On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 6:29 PM, Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 10:08 PM, aglynn42 <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm currently porting the Pharo VM to Solaris 11 for a specific project (Sparc and x86). I was wondering how many users prefer the stack VM,
On a platform with a JIT VM, no one uses the Stack VM. But as I understand it, the reduced complexity of the StackVM as a pure interpreter is easier to port and a pragmatic stepping stone. Perhaps its not so critical since the cpu target is the same. One advantage of having both is helping to isolate problems to the JIT or non-JIT code.
btw, I recently started playing with the VM Simulator and found it easier to follow execution of the StackVM to learn VM architecture, which will help highlight JIT differences when I soon try the JIT simulator. Here is some info if you want to try it...
http://forum.world.st/Exploring-the-simulator-was-Re-REPL-image-for-simulati...
You might like to subscribe to the VM mail-lists... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-beginners
cheers -ben
as for my own purposes the JIT is better (better concurrency when not using OS functions on a 128 thread machine, which is the deployment target). However since it wouldn't be that much extra work to port the stack VM, if there is interest I will do that as well. thanks Andrew Glynn