TruffleSOM - The Simple Object Machine Smalltalk implemented using the Truffle Framework

Introduction

This is the repository for TruffleSOM, an implementation of the Simple Object Machine (SOM). SOM is a minimal Smalltalk dialect that was used to teach VM construction at the Hasso Plattner Institute. It was originally built at the University of Århus (Denmark) where it was used for teaching and as the foundation for Resilient Smalltalk.

In addition to TruffleSOM, other implementations exist for Java (SOM), C (CSOM), C++ (SOM++), and Squeak/Pharo Smalltalk (AweSOM).

A simple Hello World looks like:

Hello = (
  run = (
    'Hello World!' println.
  )
)

TruffleSOM is a Truffle-based implementation of SOM, including SOM's standard library and a number of examples. Please see the main project page for links to other VM implementations.

Obtaining and Running TruffleSOM

To checkout the code, run:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/graalvm/mx.git
git clone https://github.com/SOM-st/TruffleSOM.git
export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`/mx

TruffleSOM uses the mx build tool, which is easiest to use when on the PATH.

After downloading the git repositories, TruffleSOM can be build with:

cd TruffleSOM
./som --setup labsjdk  # downloads a compatible JDK
mx build

And now we, can execute tests with:

./som -G -cp Smalltalk TestSuite/TestHarness.som

A simple Hello World program is executed with:

./som -G -cp Smalltalk Examples/Hello.som

To work on TruffleSOM, mx can generate project definitions for Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans. Chose the one you prefer:

mx eclipseinit
mx intellijinit
mx netbeansinit

TruffleSOM uses the Graal compiler to reach state-of-the-art performance. To use it, we need to compile it together with TruffleSOM:

mx --env libgraal build

Afterwards, we can run a benchmark, and observe that the initial iterations take much longer, but after a while we reach magnitudes faster execution speeds:

./som -cp Smalltalk Examples/Benchmarks/BenchmarkHarness.som Mandelbrot 100 500

Information on previous authors are included in the AUTHORS file. This code is distributed under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for details.

Build Status

Thanks to GitHub Actions, all commits of this repository are tested. The current build status is:

YourKit

This Project makes use of the Yourkit profiler to help find performance bugs and aid in our research of profilers.

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