VM implementation choice

Sabine Schnabeltier

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Aug 7, 2023, 5:00:29 PM8/7/23

to Newspeak Programming Language

I would like to understand some of the reasons that you decided it was worth the extra work to re-implement the VM in WASM. Was there something you weren't satisfied with in the OpenSmalltalk VM? Thanks!

Gilad Bracha

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Aug 7, 2023, 5:29:11 PM8/7/23

to newspeak...@googlegroups.com

Hi Sabine,

There were two completely separate motivations

a. The Web seems to be the most relevant platform on which to run Newspeak. We had a Newspeak to Javascript compiler, but found it very hard to get the correct semantics without undue complexity and/or performance penalty. That may no longer be the case, but at the time, things like become: and allInstances (and hence object schema evolution) did not seem feasible. Hence a dedicated VM running on WASM.

b. We found the Newspeak OpenSmalltalk VM (aka NSVM) was becoming less and less viable. NSVM is a distinct variant, with special bytecodes etc, and yet it shares a lot with the Smalltalk VMs. The latter kept evolving, but NSVM was not being thoroughly tested and maintained by the OpenSMalltalk VM implementors. Thus the changes to the Smalltalk engine effectively destabilized NSVM. We found that NSVM became less reliable over time.

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 2:00 PM Sabine Schnabeltier <sabine.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:

I would like to understand some of the reasons that you decided it was worth the extra work to re-implement the VM in WASM. Was there something you weren't satisfied with in the OpenSmalltalk VM? Thanks!

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Cheers, Gilad

Sabine Schnabeltier

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Aug 7, 2023, 7:43:36 PM8/7/23

to Newspeak Programming Language

Hi Gilad, thanks for your answer!

Is it your intention that Newspeak is a testbed for your new language ideas? Or do you also anticipate that it will be used for the deployment of commercial applications? Either way (or both!) is interesting!

Thanks!

Sabine

Gilad Bracha

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Aug 7, 2023, 8:31:53 PM8/7/23

to newspeak...@googlegroups.com

Hi Sabine,

Thanks for your interest in Newspeak!

From your question, I gather you are not aware of Newspeak's history. The project originated in industry, as an incubation (an internal startup, if you will) at Cadence, starting in October of 2006. The crash of 2008 brought funding to an untimely end some two years later. Nevertheless, the application we had built on top of Newspeak was used for almost 10 years. So Newspeak was intended and used for production. After funding ended, work on Newspeak continued as a labor of love. Alas, we did not have the resources to maintain production quality, and so Newspeak evolved in reverse, becoming less mature over time (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Case_of_Benjamin_Button_(film) ).

At the same time, Newspeak always had a research component, which is why we published a paper at ECOOP in 2010 (which won the best paper award that year).

Recently, my focus has been on using Newspeak as a basis for a personal productivity tool. There's an editor, called Ampleforth, that should, with enough work, subsume a host of annoying applications. You can read about Ampleforth in itself :

https://blog.bracha.org/Ampleforth-Live22/out/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Live22Submission.vfuel

and watch a demo video at

https://youtu.be/gfbzC_90fJE

However, in the absence of volunteers, progress is gated by my free time, which in 2023 has been very limited.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/newspeaklanguage/d9eb9719-af70-4a4c-86d5-7b80794c56dbn%40googlegroups.com.

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Cheers, Gilad

Eliot Miranda

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Aug 8, 2023, 1:55:23 PM8/8/23

to newspeak...@googlegroups.com

Hi Gilad,

On Aug 7, 2023, at 5:31 PM, Gilad Bracha <gi...@bracha.org> wrote:

Hi Sabine,

Thanks for your interest in Newspeak!

From your question, I gather you are not aware of Newspeak's history. The project originated in industry, as an incubation (an internal startup, if you will) at Cadence, starting in October of 2006. The crash of 2008 brought funding to an untimely end some two years later. Nevertheless, the application we had built on top of Newspeak was used for almost 10 years. So Newspeak was intended and used for production. After funding ended, work on Newspeak continued as a labor of love. Alas, we did not have the resources to maintain production quality, and so Newspeak evolved in reverse, becoming less mature over time (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Case_of_Benjamin_Button_(film) ).

At the same time, Newspeak always had a research component, which is why we published a paper at ECOOP in 2010 (which won the best paper award that year).

Recently, my focus has been on using Newspeak as a basis for a personal productivity tool. There's an editor, called Ampleforth, that should, with enough work, subsume a host of annoying applications. You can read about Ampleforth in itself :

https://blog.bracha.org/Ampleforth-Live22/out/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Live22Submission.vfuel

and watch a demo video at

https://youtu.be/gfbzC_90fJE

However, in the absence of volunteers, progress is gated by my free time, which in 2023 has been very limited.

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 4:43 PM Sabine Schnabeltier <sabine.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gilad, thanks for your answer!

Is it your intention that Newspeak is a testbed for your new language ideas? Or do you also anticipate that it will be used for the deployment of commercial applications? Either way (or both!) is interesting!

Thanks!

Sabine

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 4:29:11 PM UTC-5 Gilad Bracha wrote:
Hi Sabine,

There were two completely separate motivations

a. The Web seems to be the most relevant platform on which to run Newspeak. We had a Newspeak to Javascript compiler, but found it very hard to get the correct semantics without undue complexity and/or performance penalty. That may no longer be the case, but at the time, things like become: and allInstances (and hence object schema evolution) did not seem feasible. Hence a dedicated VM running on WASM.

b. We found the Newspeak OpenSmalltalk VM (aka NSVM) was becoming less and less viable. NSVM is a distinct variant, with special bytecodes etc, and yet it shares a lot with the Smalltalk VMs. The latter kept evolving, but NSVM was not being thoroughly tested and maintained by the OpenSMalltalk VM implementors. Thus the changes to the Smalltalk engine effectively destabilized NSVM. We found that NSVM became less reliable over time.

I hope you realize you can’t expect the OpenSmalltalk vm team, a small volunteer team focussed on Smalltalk, to provide this effort for you. Had the Newspeak community done the testing to report bugs I would have fixed them. But I was in no position to shoulder the testing responsibilities required by Newspeak. That task fell to the Newspeak community.

And the door is still open. The Newspeak code remains in the vm source (unlike the Pharo fork of the OpenSmalltalk vm which removed it all). The OSVM continues to evolve. Tom Braun is productizing his incremental old space collector which builds on the work Clément and I did on support for incremental old space compaction, a feature very few GCs support. Work is also underway to finish the threaded FFI, which will provide fully non-blocking callouts, callbacks, and is applicable to long-running plugin primitives.

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 2:00 PM Sabine Schnabeltier <sabine.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to understand some of the reasons that you decided it was worth the extra work to re-implement the VM in WASM. Was there something you weren't satisfied with in the OpenSmalltalk VM? Thanks!
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Cheers, Gilad

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Cheers, Gilad

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Gilad Bracha

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Aug 8, 2023, 7:15:21 PM8/8/23

to newspeak...@googlegroups.com

My dear Eliot,

Rest assured I expect absolutely nothing from you. I don't have any interest in the OpenSmalltalk VM effort either.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/newspeaklanguage/C59898BB-BE82-44AA-9D35-6CA585F4F3F2%40gmail.com.