Class-based dynamic languages on Truffle OSM

[Stefan Marr]

Hi Raffaello:

> Yes, the design I would like to realize, after a look at TruffleSOM to learn about Stefan's way, is to speculate on the type of the instance variables (fields) as to distinguish between primitive values like small integers and doubles and true references, as otherwise values would need to be boxed. So where traditional Smalltalk implementations use tagging, speculating on the type would be beneficial, as the paper points out.

In TruffleSOM, integers are transparently managed to be either Java longs or BigIntegers. SOM’s Double is directly mapped on Java doubles.

The object-layout-specific changes are all in this commit:
https://github.com/smarr/TruffleSOM/commit/2b02300e34ebe3a421d2ce848f5bab17a7a29bc0
(Note, the commit actually removes them to see what the performance impact is.)

Best regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Marr
INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
http://stefan-marr.de/research/