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b-strauss / strongtalk

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multi-threaded VM #17

Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
The VM is not internally multi-threaded.  

This is a very big project, and especially needs extremely robust testing.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by David.Gr...@gmail.com on 22 Sep 2006 at 10:36

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Smalltalk isn't Java, is it sensible to blindly adopt the same threading model ?

(as far as i know, there's no production-strength Smalltalk VM that supports
preemptive multi-threading in smalltalk code... VW doesn't)

Is it realistic for an opensource project to try to achieve what took many 
man-years
at Sun ? Do we really want to (re)write Hotspot ?

It looks like a popular alternative is to restrict VMs to single-threading with 
async
callouts (like strongtalk already does). Scalability can then be achieved using
several VMs.

In the case of Strongtalk, because of it's venerable age, the system already 
has a
very small footprint, thus we have a good opportunity to embrace a model of
lightweight cooperative VMs instead of a single multi-threaded monster.

Original comment by prunedt...@gmail.com on 10 Apr 2007 at 7:16