Self-interest March 1992

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

3 participants
3 discussions

Sample programs
by danny＠cs.ttu.edu 31 Mar '92

31 Mar '92

I was wondering if I could get a few sample script files that are less involved than the benchmarks. Maybe something along the lines of a program that takes a string of characters and prints them in reverse order. A few files along this complexity level would be helpful. Thank You, Danny Travis dannyt(a)cs4sun.cs.ttu.edu

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Re: Portability of Self?
by urs＠cs.stanford.edu 04 Mar '92

04 Mar '92

> Can those in the know give some indication of the feasibility or > effort involved in producing a working Self for non-Sun systems? Are > there any plans to reduce the dependence of Self on Sun specific > features? Well, it's not that we *want* to make it "Sun-specific", but any compiler will be machine-specific to some extent. In the ideal case (e.g. GNU gcc) you can port to a new architecture by rewriting some machine desription, an effort taking a few weeks or so. The Self compilers aren't that easy to port, but they do have a separation between a machine-independent front end and the back end, and so it should be possible to rewrite a back end for a new architecture. It is true, however, that there isn't much documentation telling you how to do it. Why don't we port Self to various other architectures ourselves? The main reasons are: we don't have the machines, and we don't have the manpower to support many different versions. The last point is especially important: right now, the implementation is still evolving at a rapid pace since we're trying out new ideas all the time. Just 4 years ago nobody would have thought it was possible to implement Self efficiently, and while we've made great progress we certainly don't have all the final answers yet. We'd love to make Self more popular by making it easy to port, and I'm sure we'll work on that in future releases. Unfortunately, being a small research group, our manpower is limited and so it might take a while for a truly well-documented VM to appear. On the positive side, the upcoming release includes a simple ("dumb but fast") compiler that is only about 4000 lines long (including about 1000 lines each for the Sparc and 68K back ends). Since it is so small, it should be possible to understand it by looking at the source. On the negative side, the 68K back end isn't fully working yet, and the generated code is pretty slow. Hope that helps, -Urs

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Portability of Self?
by jrc＠concurrent.co.uk 04 Mar '92

04 Mar '92

The only system I have easy access to which can run Self is a rather elderly, narrow-minded Sun 3/160. I have access to some of our own wonderful products which have several of either Motorola 68040 or Mips R3000 processors and a more reasonable amount of memory. Reading through the README file on self.stanford.edu and some items from the mailing list it seems that the next release may include "a humongous pile (50k lines +) of poorly documented C++, implementing the Self virtual machine". Can those in the know give some indication of the feasibility or effort involved in producing a working Self for non-Sun systems? Are there any plans to reduce the dependence of Self on Sun specific features? -- John Connett ___________ / _________/_ | DOMAIN: jrc(a)concurrent.co.uk /_/________/ / | UUCP: ...!uunet!uknet!concurrent!jrc Concurrent/__________/ | Royal Mail: 227 Bath Road Computer Corporation | Slough SL1 4AX, England

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Self-interest March 1992