Second Day, Fibonacci Numbers running

Yesterday was a day of excessive coding. After finishing the W_Object model together on the projector, we worked in four teams on three parallel tracks:

• loading a real Squeak image (Adrian K, Carl Friedrich)
• interpreter loop and bytecode dispatch (Armin, Adrian L, Lukas, Toon)
• implementing numbered primitives (arithmetic) (Niko, Tudor, Oscar)

Image Loading

There are certainly worse save file formats than Smalltalk images, however to conserve bits must have been very fashionable back then in the 80s. There are three formats for object headers, the compact one being the most crazy:

(2 bits) header type
(6 bits) word size
(4 bits) object format
(5 bits) compact class id
(12 bits) identity hash
(3 bits) used by gc

with that, memory footprint of empty instances can be as low as 4 bytes only, but at the expense of having 12 bits for identity hashes only! We are thinking about integrating a transition from 12 bit to full word hashes in the VM. Legacy instances from the Squeak image file will retain their 12 bits (to not corrupt existing hash tables) but any newly allocated object will be initialized with full 32 bit hashes. The limitation being that we lose backwards compatibility to the Smalltalk-80 save format.

At the end of the day, we were able to load in the raw data of all objects in the image, and to verify that all header information and pointers are correctly set. Today the image loader will be finished by instantiating one W_Object (or subclasses) for each of these image chunks.

Interpreter and Bytecodes

Armin, Adrian L, Lukas, Toon started implementing the bytecode dispatch loop and the context frame class. Once they got this they split in two groups and started implementing the bytecodes (most of which are there by now, apart from some which call primitives). At one point during the afternoon they managed to copy Squeak's bytecode for the Fibonacci function and run it.

Primitives and Base Image

The trio of Niko, Oscar and Tudor began implementing the base image, including class objects. They implemented templates for the math operations. This part is more or less complete, except for promoting from small to large integers.

However there are still plenty of primitives to go for the next days.