Self on the Macintosh

cramakrishnan at acm.org cramakrishnan at acm.org
Wed Aug 16 20:37:15 UTC 2000


Hi Selfers.

A couple of weeks ago i managed to get my hands on a Sun Ultra 1
167Mhz (128MB of ram).  Of course, the first thing i did was to
install Self.  Though i'd seen the papers on the performance of the
VM, i was still shocked by how fast Self is on that machine!  It
absolutely flies!

Most of my playing around with Self has been on my B&W G3 300 (192 MB)
at home.  First, i want to say that I am soo grateful to be able to
run Self on the Mac, but I have to admit it pretty slow on my machine.
Useable, but barely.  I've put Self onto a Powerbook G3 500 (128 MB)
at work and it is considerably faster than my G3 300, but still not as
fast as the Ultra 1!

I'm assuming this performance is because the SIC is so awesome (not
because the Sparc is that much better than the PPC :), and I would
love to see it on the Mac.

So, what's involved in getting the SIC on the PPC?  Implement
genHelper_ppc.c, node_ppc.c, and any supporting methods on Assembler?
What else?  Is this work that's worth tackling, or is it going to be
extraordinarily difficult?

If it is going to be extraordinarily difficult is there any thing we
can do to speed up performance on the Mac?  Implement a scaled-down,
windowing system that uses native widgets?  Wait for Self-in-Self
where it should be easier to work with the VM?

What are your thoughts?

- sekhar

--
C. Ramakrishnan        cramakrishnan at acm.org



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