Building the VM


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Building the VM

Last updated at 5:19 pm UTC on 4 May 2020

Squeak VM is written in Squeak Smalltalk and consists of two main parts:

platform-independent VM core, and (aka src/)
platform-dependent VM support code (aka platforms/)

The former part is available in VMMaker package in a Monticello repository at http://source.squeak.org/VMMaker. The core VM is written in a subset of Smalltalk known as Slang. The VMMaker package contains a Slang to C code generator that emits C source code. This code is then supplemented by platforms support code to build the platform-specific VM app.

The composite sources are maintained in two main repositories:

The current version is maintained in opensmalltalk-vm github repository
The trunk version (upto roughly V3) is maintained in a SVN repository.

The current version is supported on the following platforms:

Windows Compiling Squeak on Windows
Unix/Linux Compiling Interpreter VM on Linux
Mac OS
Apple iOS Compiling Squeak for iOS
RISC OS
ARM (experimental)

Each platform version may be built with variant features:

Interpreter - V3, Stack, Cog
Object representation - V3, Spur
Bytecode set - V3, ExtendedV3, Sista
Word size - 32-bit, 64-bit

Here are some of the common variants of Squeak VM

SistaV1 VM - Cog VM enhanced with an adaptive optimizer
Spur VM - enhanced object representation to support 32-bit/64-bit words.
Cog VM - a high performance fork that supports JIT (Cogit) and both 32-bit and 64-bit executables
StackInterpreter VM
ContextInterpreter VM
Interpreter VM - this is the initial interpreter (aka Trunk Interpreter)

Pre-built binaries for currently supported platforms are available

http://files.squeak.org/base/ (stable), and
http://files.squeak.org/trunk/ (testing).

See also - Old notes on Virtual Machine hacking