292 Rocks, Core Smalltalk running thanks to all

[Christian Thalinger]

On Apr 11, 2011, at 3:00 PM, Mark Roos wrote:
> 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. 

That's great news!  I would like to give it a shot and run a couple of tests on different machines and architectures.  Is that possible?

-- Christian
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