Musing out loud... [Why not Smalltalk?]

[Piercarlo Grandi]

>>> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001 09:09:13 -0400, "Eric Clayberg"
>>> <clayberg at instantiations.com> said:

[ ... ]

>>>> Javaites probably know that the Self VM project was where Sun's
>>>> 'hotspot' technology was developed.

>> Here's how Sun presents it
>>   http://java.sun.com/products/hotspot/whitepaper.html

  > "The Java HotSpot performance engine architecture addresses the Java
  > programming language performance issues described above by using
  > adaptive optimization technology. Adaptive optimization is the fruit
  > of many years of research into object-oriented language
  > implementation performed by the Self group at Sun's research
  > division.

clayberg> That's a pretty funny example of revisionist history for those
clayberg> of us who were around when Anamorphic first built HotSpot (for
clayberg> Smalltalk) and shopped it around (in 1996).  [ ... ] What Sun
clayberg> says above is sort of true, but leaves out quite a few
clayberg> intermediate steps. Several of the ideas for HotSpot
clayberg> originated with Self (or were well known in the literature),
clayberg> but it took the Anamorphic team to pull them all together and
clayberg> prove that they worked in concert. The Self group did not
clayberg> create HotSpot; Sun bought it off the shelf.

Uhhhhhhmmmmmm, yes and no. It looks like that Hotspot the Anamorphic
proof of concept was bought off the shelf for a rather large price; but
Sun's "adaptive optimization technology", whether called HotSpot or not,
was definitely developed by the Self group and collaborators at Sun Labs
and related organizations:

  http://WWW.Sun.com/research/self/papers/papers.html

This development succeeded to the point that Mario Wolczko's fairly
straighforward Smalltalk-80 implementation on top of Self:

  http://WWW.Sun.com/research/self/release/smalltalk.html
  http://WWW.Sun.com/research/self/release/Self-4.0/manuals/smalltalk.ps.Z

was often much faster than any then existing Smalltalk-80
implementation, even popular commercial ones.

Thus I find it a bit bizarre to imagine that "it took the Anamorphic
team to pull them all together and prove that they worked in concert",
because the Self group not only largely developed them, but they did
that themselves (actually it was mostly just one guy for the
Smalltalk-80 clone) and in the most straightforward way possible.