from Hacker News

IBM Open Sources Multi-core Smalltalk VM

by tialys on 11/4/10, 4:27 PM with 13 comments

• by superjared on 11/4/10, 6:45 PM

  Is anyone here using Smalltalk for a production application? What are your thoughts on this VM?

• by sedachv on 11/5/10, 4:14 AM

  I got all excited, and then:

  "Hosting an Object Heap on Manycore Hardware: An Exploration"

  and

  "Garbage collector is as simple as possible it is neither concurrent nor parallel performance can be problematic"

  Well, they've solved the allocation part... but that's kind of not really useful without a concurrent+parallel collector.

• by protomyth on 11/4/10, 5:17 PM

  And Squeak just went to a massive effort to get everything MIT licensed. Wonder if they will incorporate this given its license.

• by rbanffy on 11/4/10, 4:51 PM

  Let me be the first to say it: Wow!

• by whyenot on 11/4/10, 5:38 PM

  Today, the RoarVM supports the parallel execution of Smalltalk programs on x86 compatible multicore systems and Tilera TILE64-based manycore systems. It is tested with standard Squeak 4.1 closure-enabled images, and with a stripped down version of a MVC-based Squeak 3.9 image.

  Combined with the recent efforts to tidy up and pare down Squeak's image, this is really exciting!

• by raphar on 11/4/10, 9:23 PM

  Anyone knows if there are Tilera powered systems in production environment? (And what can you run on them?)

  I happen to have a manycore fetiche :D

  Edit: http://www.tilera.com/solutions/cloud_computing

  I want one of these. Anyone has one of these SQ2?

• by rasur on 11/4/10, 6:06 PM

  It will be interesting to see if Pharo merges in this work, but.. regardless, this is an excellent development and I look forwards to playing with it.

• by cies on 11/4/10, 10:11 PM

  i hope for a ruby front-end will emerge for it.

  like what happened with maglev: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MagLev_%28Rub...

  a language cannot have enough active implementations. yet only needs one spec.