Creating efficient systems for object-oriented languages

Norihisa Suzuki, Minoru Terada
1984 Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '84  
Increasingly computer science research has been done using workstations with high-resolution bitmap display systems. Smalltalk-B0t is a very attractive programming language for such computation environments, since it has very sophisticated graphical systems and programming environments. Unfortunately there arc still very few computer systems on which Smalltalk-80 can run with satisfactory speed, and furthermore they are quite expensive. In order to make Smallt.alk-80 accessible to a large group
more » ... of people at low cost. we have developed compiler techniques useful to generate efficient code for standard register machines such as MC6B000. We have also extended Smalltalk-80 to include type expressions, which allow compilers to generate efficient code generally very expensive and only a very few researchers can afford them. In order to make Smalltalk-80 programming systems widely available, they have to run on standard microprocessors such as MC68000. As the preliminary process for releasing Smalltalk-80, Xerox licensed Smalltalk-80 to a number of companies, which tried to implement it on a standard machines such as V A X and MC68000 based machines. These experiments [6] were generally very disappointing. Therefore, we decided to put our efforts in generating efficient systems on MC68000. Even though most of the attempts in [6] to put Smalltalk-80 on conventional computers are not successful, they have obtained extensive performance measurements, which are very useful to the people like us who want to implement Smalltalk-80 systems.
doi:10.1145/800017.800541 dblp:conf/popl/SuzukiT84 fatcat:uytkluipwjbizigdhot55qrahe