3 ms·
Never heard of SOAR. It would be pretty sweet though to have a powerful & multi-core chip running a Smalltalk OS that could do something with all the cores. I'd
by 4thaccount 8y ago
Never heard of SOAR. It would be pretty sweet though to have a powerful & multi-core chip running a Smalltalk OS that could do something with all the cores. I'd also like to see kOS from Arthur Whitney if he ever finishes it, although I'd never be able to afford any of their products.
- mpweiher 8y agohttps://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-287.pdf https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-287... https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/soar-smalltalk-without-bytecodes-dMyiYUWgIr https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machin... http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/techreports/ucb/text/ERL-85-48.pdf http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/techreports/ucb/text/E... Looking at the results, they say that hardware tag-checking for integer arithmetic and register windows for fast method calls were the two most important features of the design, nearly doubling performance. I wonder if that still holds today, with the memory wall so dominant that CPUs tend to be stalled quite a bit (therefore enough time to do tag checking in software).
- jabl 8y agoNowadays the thinking seems to be that register windows were a mistake (e.g. in SPARC), and newer designs such as RISC-V or Aarch64 don't do it.