Publications

Powerlang bootstrapper was designed to bring alive Smalltalk systems from specifications stored in source code files. Powerlang includes an evaluator that is able to execute initialization code of the Smalltalk being bootstrapped. Could we use that same evaluator for running that same Smalltalk on the Web? We present our work in progress towards that goal, which involves transpiling the Smalltalk evaluator, written in Smalltalk, to JavaScript, generating a Smalltalk image compatible with that evaluator, and optimizing the evaluator and the Smalltalk code of the image.

Developing a programming language from scratch, with a stable and yet efficient runtime environment could be considered a titanic task. To mitigate this situation, and promote the early emergence of new languages, two main alternatives have been proposed: adopt an established virtual machine or exploit meta-compilation frameworks. In addition, micro VMs have been proposed as a foundation for developing VMs on top of a thin layer of abstraction similar to the micro kernel concept proposed for operating systems. Each of these approaches represents a compromise solving the tensions between flexibility, correctness, efficiency, and effort when designing a language runtime. Accordingly, each approach exposes its benefits while still suffers from limitations. The Bee development team has been developing a complete Smalltalk system for more than a decade. During the journey, we implemented several artifacts needed to build a virtual machine: parsers, compilers, assemblers, bootstrapping utilities, (native code) debuggers, remote execution protocols, simulation tools, and garbage collection algorithms, among others. After weighing all the different paths followed during these years, in this paper we advocate for a novel approach for building language runtimes. Concretely, we envision Powerlang, a framework that would enable to design, debug, inspect, compile, optimize, and test new programming languages, with a moderate effort and significant versatility. Powerlang represents a novel point in the design space of this kind of solutions. Finally, Powerlang is developed using a live environment like Smalltalk. We also elaborate on why this is an excellent match to host such a framework.

Operating systems are traditionally implemented in low-level, performance-oriented programming languages. These languages typically rely on minimal runtime support and provide unfettered access to the underlying hardware. Tradition has benefits: developers control the resources that the operating system manages and few performance bottlenecks cannot be overcome with clever feats of programming. On the other hand, this makes operating systems harder to understand and maintain. Furthermore, those languages have few built-in barriers against bugs. This paper is an experiment in side-stepping operating systems, and pushing functionality into the runtime of high-level programming languages. The question we try to answer is how much support is needed to run an application written in, say, Smalltalk or Python on bare metal, that is, with no underlying operating system. We present a framework named NopSys that allows this, and we validate it with the implementation of CogNos a Smalltalk virtual machine running on bare x86 hardware. Experimental results suggest that this approach is promising.

We report our experience in porting Bee Smalltalk Dynamic Metacircular Runtime (DMR) from the 32-bit Intel-x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) to AMD64, as a first step to move forward towards a multi-platform Bee Smalltalk. This port required subtle changes in most areas present in typical Virtual Machines (VMs): low-level object shape, JIT-compiler, garbage collector, primitives and FFI. We present a comprehensive analysis of the migration difficulties, and the key implementation and design decisions taken during our work in the context of Bee, which is implemented in terms of a Smalltalk DMR, in contrast to VMs written in languages like C/C++. Additionally, we depict the image-level mechanisms we deviced in order to support the transition between 32 and 64-bit images, which can also be applied to traditional-VM based Smalltalks.

In dynamic object-oriented languages, low-level mechanisms such as just-in-time compilation, object allocation, garbage collection (GC) and method dispatch are often handled by virtual machines (VMs). VMs are typically implemented using static languages, allowing only few changes at run time. In such systems, the VM is not part of the language and interfaces to memory management or method dispatch are fixed, not allowing for arbitrary adaptation. Furthermore, the implementation can typically not be inspected or debugged with standard tools used to work on application code. This paper reports on our experience building Bee, a dynamic Smalltalk runtime, written in Smalltalk. Bee is a Dynamic Metacircular Runtime (DMR) and seamlessly integrates the VM into the application and thereby overcomes many restrictions of classic VMs, for instance by allowing arbitrary code modifications of the VM at run time. Furthermore, the approach enables developers to use their standard tools for application code also for the VM, allowing them to inspect, debug, understand, and modify a DMR seamlessly. We detail our experience of implementing GC, compilation, and optimizations in a DMR. We discuss examples where we found that DMRs can improve understanding of the system, provide tighter control of the software stack, and facilitate research. We also show that the Bee DMR matches and surpass the performance of a widely used Smalltalk VM.

Dynamic Metacircular Runtimes (DMRs) enable a new way of developing Virtual Machines (VMs). Instead of writing VMs by manipulating files, DMR programmers work on a running system by modifying its methods, classes and, more generally, objects. This development workflow has both advantages and disadvantages. While it allows us to more easily understand the behavior of the system by showing it alive, it is also problematic, because the system relies on itself to be constantly working. In this work, we experiment with adapting such live programming tools to make them safer for the development of core DMR components. Furthermore, we make them robust so that they can work on crashed DMRs or systems not that are currently fully working. This paper describes Metaphysics, a framework that combines mirrors and proxies to reify different message execution semantics, allowing execution of code by mixing behavior of a remote, possibly broken system with a local fully-working one. With Metaphysics we were able to create native code debugging and profiling tools. These new tools make full use of the metacircularity of our Bee DMR and enable a dynamic, fast-paced edit-test workflow like the one we are used to when developing application-level code, instead of the classic edit-compile-get-coffee-test cycle used for state-of-the-art VMs.

Bee is a Smalltalk dialect. Its runtime is exceptional in that it is completely written in Smalltalk. Bee includes a minimal kernel with on-demand loaded libraries, a JIT compiler, an FFI interface, an optimizing SSA-based compiler, a garbage collector, and native threading support among other things. Despite being written in Smalltalk, Bee achieves promising performance levels.

Self describing (pure reflective) and meta-circular systems have many advantages, but in some low-level operations, such as memory snapshotting, self-modification brings some problems. The problem of atomic-copy deals with object immutability and virtual machine state consistency that should be enforced when the same system is used to save itself. Specifically in Smalltalk environments, generating a complete snapshot of the Smalltalk object memory, using the same system that has to be persisted is a challenge since the system changes itself during the saving process. In the context of our work, the SqueakNOS environment (an OS written in Smalltalk) lacks persistency features because of the complexity of the atomic-copy problem. In this paper we present a page-based memory manager which can handle native page faults at language level and then a copy-on-write strategy on top of it. Except low-level hardware features, all the implementation is written at Smalltalk abstraction level. Additionally to the advantage of dealing with very low-level operations using high-level languages, we introduce a mechanism that reduces memory usage up to 95%, compared to other approaches on SqueakNOS.

The potential of GPU computing used in general purpose parallel programming has been amply shown. These massively parallel many-core multiprocessors are available to any users in every PCs, notebook, game console or workstation. In this work, we present the parallel version of a mesh-generating algorithm and its execution time reduction by using off-the-shelf GPU technology. We use commodities GPUs as a useful CPU co-processor to improve this kind of applications, characterized by a high level of data parallelism. Compared to the sequential algorithm, our techniques achieve 6X overall performance for GPU-CPU implementation; furthermore we achieve 50X speedup when implementing core operations of the algorithm. Results show that GPU provides a helpful platform for high performance computing to improve the execution time of these applications.