Re: [Help-smalltalk] Google Summer of Code is here, your ideas please!

[Holger Hans Peter Freyther]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 02:29:51PM +0100, Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> Multi-threaded GST VM
> Mentor: me
> Description:
> GNU Smalltalk is a simple but heavily optimized Virtual Machine.
> Smalltalk supports Processes but they are executed in a single
> OS process. We would like to move global variables into a struct
> and start using thread local storage. In the first step it should
> be possible to execute bytecode in parallel on two different OS
> processes. This should improve the locking/atomic operation in
> Smalltalk. 


Another VM topic I would like to mentor is:

JIT/Interpreter improvements
Mentor: me
Description:
GNU Smalltalk has an interpreter and a simple Just-In-Time Compiler.
The JIT Compiler is using the GNU Lightning macro assembler. At the
compile time of GNU Smalltalk one needs to decide if one wants to use
the JIT or the Interpreter.

In the first step a newer GNU Lightning should be supported and the
testcases should be made to work on x86, AMD64 and ARMv5te instruction
set architectures. In the second step it should be attempted to build
a single GNU Smalltalk binary that can use the interpreter or the JIT
at the same time and a simple heuristic to decide when to JIT and when
to interpret.