L. Peter Deutsch. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture's Impact on Software Architecture. In [Kra83].  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....can improve performance, and some implementations of object oriented systems have relied heavily on hardware support. For example, the Xerox Dorado, for a long time the fastest Smalltalk implementation available, contained microcode support for large portions of the Smalltalk virtual machine [Deu83]. Ungar reported that the SOAR system would have been 26 slower without instructions for tagged arithmetic [Ung87] Williams and Wolczko argued that software controlled caching improves the performance and locality of object oriented systems [WW90] However, none of the systems previously studied ....

L. Peter Deutsch. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture's Impact on Software Architecture. In [Kra83].

....of abstraction. 3.1.2 Deutsch Schiffman Smalltalk 80 System The definition of Smalltalk 80 specifies that source code methods are translated into byte codes, the machine instructions of a stack machine. Originally, Smalltalk 80 ran on Xerox Dorados implementing this instruction set in microcode [Deu83]. Subsequent software implementations of Smalltalk 80 on stock hardware supplied a virtual machine that interpreted these byte codes in software. Needless to say this interpretation was quite slow [Kra83] 14 Additionally, Smalltalk 80 activation records are defined and implemented as first class ....

L. Peter Deutsch. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture's Impact on Software Architecture. In Glenn Krasner, editor, Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice. AddisonWesley, Reading, MA, 1983.

....can improve performance, and some implementations of object oriented systems have relied heavily on hardware support. For example, the Xerox Dorado, for a long time the fastest Smalltalk implementation available, contained microcode support for large portions of the Smalltalk virtual machine [Deu83]. Ungar reported that the SOAR system would have been 26 slower without instructions for tagged arithmetic [Ung87] Williams and Wolczko argued that software controlled caching improves the performance and locality of objectoriented systems [WW90] However, none of the systems previously studied ....

L. Peter Deutsch, The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture's Impact on Software Architecture. In [Kra83].

....of Smalltalk matched the architecture of the machine somewhat better than other machines. The machine was constructed from ECL, and had a cycle time of 60ns. An elaborate instruction fetch unit could decode and dispatch Smalltalk bytecodes into microcode routines with high efficiency [LMO81, Deu83] The implementation of the Smalltalk VM was done mostly in microcode, and used advanced garbage collection techniques. Despite this, Smalltalk programs were still wasting a great deal of the machine s power. As part of the M.Sc. study, it became clear that a microcoded implementation of the VM ....

L. P. Deutsch. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 implementation: Hardware architecture's impact on software architecture. In Krasner

....instance variables, accesses to local variables, and primitive calls since all these are syntactically equivalent in SELF. In contrast, Smalltalk 80 has a much more machine oriented byte code format; in fact, the byte codes were directly interpreted by microcode in early Smalltalk implementations [43]. For example, Smalltalk has special byte codes for instance variable accesses (specifying the slot number) local accesses, and the most frequent primitives (arithmetic and control transfer) Therefore, the Smalltalk 80 byte code compiler (the equivalent of the SELF parser) already performs some ....

.... Williams and Wolczko argue that software controlled caching improved the performance and locality of objectoriented systems [142] Xerox Dorado Smalltalk, for a long time the fastest Smalltalk implementation available, contained microcode support for large portions of the Smalltalk virtual machine [43]. However, none of these systems used an optimizing compiler comparable to SELF 93, and so the results of previous studies may not be valid for the current SELF implementation. In order to evaluate which architectural or implementation features (if any) would benefit its execution, we have ....

L. Peter Deutsch. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture's Impact on Software Architecture. In [86].

....published, these performance numbers have improved significantly, by a factor of two or three. See [7] 7 A Dorado is a measure of the performance of Smalltalk implementations. One Dorado is defined as the performance of an early Smalltalk implementation in microcode on the 70ns Xerox Dorado [9]; until recently it was the fastest available Smalltalk implementation. 88 CHAMBERS, UNGAR, AND LEE Raw Running Times Smalltalk SELF SELF OO C (real ms) cpu ms) cpu ms) cpu ms) perm 1559 660 420 120 towers 2130 900 560 190 queens 859 520 470 100 intmm 1490 970 (970) 160 puzzle 16510 5290 ....

Deutsch, L. P. The Dorado Smalltalk-80 Implementation: Hardware Architecture 's Impact on Software Architecture. In Krasner, G., editor, Smalltalk80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA (1983) 113-126.

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