/pharo-vm

This is the VM used by Pharo

Primary LanguageSmalltalkOtherNOASSERTION

Pharo VM

This repository holds the code of the Pharo Virtual Machine. This implementation started as a fork of OpenSmalltalk-vm. The current project could not have been possible with all their previous work.

The current implementation presents the following core features:

  • an indirect threaded bytecode compiler using GNU extensions
  • a generational scavenger garbage collector: semi-space + nursery for the young generation, a mark-compact collecting for the old generation
  • a space for permanent objects that need not to be scanned by the GC
  • a baseline JIT compiler that
    • translates primitive operations using IR templates
    • translates bytecode methods using a simple abstract interpretation approach to reduce memory pressure (less loads/stores)
  • FFI through the well-known libFFI, and support for non-blocking FFI using worker threads

For more details about the whole Pharo VM project refer to our wiki.

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