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“Smalltalk in a C world” 2013

• Rochus 4y ago
  > Algol on the Alto, like Smalltalk, had a VM Was there really an Algol compiler on the Alto? Do the authors rather mix that up with BCPL (which isn't mentioned otherwise in the paper)?
  • igouy 4y ago
    "The Alto software included four different programming environments: BCPL, Mesa, Smalltalk, and Lisp." https://computerhistory.org/blog/xerox-alto-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/xerox-alto-source-code/
  • igouy 4y ago
    Seems likely given the BCPL implementation was based on a VM.
    • Rochus 4y ago
      Was it really a VM, or wasn't just the O-code translated to microcode by the compiler?
      • igouy 4y ago
        VM enough to be discussed in a book about Virtual Machines :-) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Virtual_Machines/vIB-npHEbd4C https://www.google.com/books/edition/Virtual_Machines/vIB-np...
        • Rochus 4y ago
          There was indeed an interpterer for O-code; but according to http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/bcpl/AltoBCPLdoc.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/bcpl/AltoBCPLdoc.pdf the Alto BCPL compiler generated relocatable binary files.
• igouy 4y ago
  "We have demonstrated an implementation of Smalltalk that has no virtual machine, just native code (JIT or statically compiled)."