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Smalltalk and especially Squeak is something I'll always love, congratulations on such an awesome project! One question I have is does the GraalVM open up any
by jgon 7y ago
Smalltalk and especially Squeak is something I'll always love, congratulations on such an awesome project!
One question I have is does the GraalVM open up any possibilities towards extending Smalltalk to a more multi-threaded domain using the capabilities of it and the JVM. I guess that the one thing that has always held me back from doing more Smalltalk is watching that single thread peak at 12.5% of my machine's capabilities, with the other 7 cores staying quiet. Or is the "single-threadedness" of Squeak too deeply baked into the implementation to be able to work around with the JVM?
I know there were some multi-core experiements a few years ago with the RoarVM but nothing seemed to make its way into the main implementation.
- fniephaus 7y agoThanks! RE your question: Squeak's scheduler (also written in Smalltalk) would need to be extended with support for multi-threading. Since that requires a significant amount of work, it's probably out of the scope of the project at this point (unless someone is interested to work on this, of course). However, it's already possible to do multi-threading from Smalltalk using some other language like Java. We have some students doing just that with Ruby to parse HTML content in multiple threads.