Re: [Help-smalltalk] GST on the JVM?

[David Given]

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
[...]
> but I was wondering, now that Sun has officially announced moving the
> JVM and Java SE to the GPL, if there would be any serious interest
> (especially at the GNU/FSF level) in having GNU Smalltalk on the JVM?

I've been vaguely thinking of that sort of thing. On the plus side, it would
mean that it would be possible to use somebody else's fast, optimised VM for
Smalltalk, which has vast performance and portability benefits... but on the
minus side, Java's a lousy match. Smalltalk is far more dynamic than Java is,
and the VM is accordingly different. Trying to add methods to a class, for
example, is (AFAIK) impossible in Java. This means you'd have to either
reimplement the class system without using the JVM's native one, or do
horrible workarounds.

(Talks2, for example, explicitly invokes the command-line Java compiler every
time it needs to compile Smalltalk code. St/JVM doesn't have any technical
information, but reading between the lines it looks like they have a
standalone compiler which doesn't allow dynamic updates once it's been
compiled. Bistro redefined the language to make life easier for themselves.)

A better match could be something like the Lua VM, which is tiny, portable,
and extremely fast, but that doesn't get you the benefits of using the JVM.

[...]
> In any case, it seemed like, respecting the license, that GNU Smalltalk
> could be a source of much good code for such a system and its image. I
> know right now GST is heavily tied to C etc., so no doubt there would be
> a bunch of work, perhaps best done along the lines of what Squeak does
> to generate the VM from translating Smalltalk-like code.

It'd require a total redesign from the ground up. Sorry. You may be able to
use the pure-Smalltalk part of the standard library, but I doubt very much if
any of the runtime would be at all useful.

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