[self-interest] Self on the Macintosh

[David Ungar]

It would be GREAT if someone were to port the SIC to the Mac.
I just ran something that took 86 secs on my 500Mhz G3 and 6 secs on a SPARC.
You will have to deal with the SIC stack frames for conversion (back 
to unoptimized code),
but should not have to implement on-stack replacement (unopt to opt), 
that should be optional with the
SICReplaceOnStack flag (if I remember correctly).

Let me know if you undertake this. I will try to be available to 
answer questions.

- Dave




At 1:37 PM -0700 8/16/00, cramakrishnan at acm.org wrote:
>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

-- 


     David Ungar
     Sun Microsystems Laboratories
     (650) 336-2618