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Description: Speeding Up Terf, Squeak, Pharo and Croquet with a fast open-source Smalltalk VM
Speeding Up Terf, Squeak, Pharo and Croquet with a fast open-source Smalltalk VM
Here’s what I hope you’ll agree is a nice example of bytecode analysis and of creating custom control structures in Smalltalk. One might think that a dynamically-typed language like Smalltalk is difficult to analyze. But in fact there are many ways of analyzing it, and this post concerns analyzing bytecode. Further, languages that support closures (Smalltalk calls them blocks, and you might know them as anonymous functions) allow one easily to construct custom control structures, and this post works up to a
First some context, which is code within the Just-in-Time compiler for Cog, the Smalltalk virtual machine for Squeak, Scratch et al that this blog discusses. In the bowels of Cog’s Just-in-Time compiler is code that merges control flow when a jump bytecode jumps to another bytecode. The execution state for the control flow falling though to the target bytecode must be merged with the execution state of the bytecode jumping to that bytecode (or vice verse). Also, a jump instruction generated as part of a jum
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