292 Rocks, Core Smalltalk running thanks to all

[Mark Roos]

I know you are all working hard to bring 292 to a release so I thought I 
would take a moment
to thank you all for your work and to tell you how much that work helped 
with our Smalltalk
porting.

We have about 500K lines of Smalltalk code which we want to run on the 
JVM.  The approach we
picked was to translate the Smalltalk byte codes to jvm byte codes.  We 
(oscar and myself) had
looked at this prior to 292 but it seemed  like a lot of work.  But after 
attending the last
dynamic languages conference we decided to give it a shot with invoke 
dynamic. 

Wow, the implementation went extremely well.  We were able to implement 
all of the Smalltalk constructs
with what is there today.  We are loading an image ( ST's code base), 
creating java classes on demand,
and using invoke dynamic to execute Smalltalk code on the jvm.  All this 
with a part time effort.  The
ease of putting a true dynamic language on the jvm was a wonder in itself. 
 All this with about 3K lines
of java code.

Thanks to everyone for making this a easy trip.  Some work which saved us 
a lot of time: John's anno
Class loader,  Rémi's work on ASM4 and Stephen's Mac ports.  And all of 
the friendly advice on this list.

We have lots of code to pour in and test but the uncertainty is gone.

Thanks again

Mark and Oscar



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