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Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system

Authors:

L. Peter Deutsch,

Allan M. SchiffmanAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '84: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 297 - 302

https://doi.org/10.1145/800017.800542

Published: 15 January 1984 Publication History

Abstract

The Smalltalk-80* programming language includes dynamic storage allocation, full upward funargs, and universally polymorphic procedures; the Smalltalk-80 programming system features interactive execution with incremental compilation, and implementation portability. These features of modern programming systems are among the most difficult to implement efficiently, even individually. A new implementation of the Smalltalk-80 system, hosted on a small microprocessor-based computer, achieves high performance while retaining complete (object code) compatibility with existing implementations. This paper discusses the most significant optimization techniques developed over the course of the project, many of which are applicable to other languages. The key idea is to represent certain runtime state (both code and data) in more than one form, and to convert between forms when needed.

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Index Terms

Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '84: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 1984

302 pages

ISBN:0897911253

DOI:10.1145/800017

Copyright © 1984 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 January 1984

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