Bee SmaRT

This post should have been written long time ago. By now I already forgot many of the difficulties I found when plugging the JIT and Smalltalk compiler to Bee, but on the upside I now have a much bigger picture of the system so I can describe more things with more details than before. Where can we start? A good place can be to compare our self-hosted runtime against the host VM. What are the differences between the JIT in Bee and the host VM? To answer that, we have to understand what a JIT is, what it is made of, and how it is plugged to the system. Good! now we have some concrete things we can describe. What is a JIT compiler Just-in-time compiler. Well, the last word tells most: it is a compiler, and the JIT part refers to the fact that it is thought for working simultaneously with the program being run, unlike things like GCC to mention some compiler, which are used to compile programs before they are run. Smalltalk code, in most implementations is compiled to bytecode...

As I've been really busy lately and didn't find time write any new post yet, I thought that at least I could put here the paper from ESUG '14 for people that didn't see it. You may find it interesting. Many things were improved in the last two years (specially performance and completeness), but I still find the paper nice and come back to read it when I have to explain some part of the system and I don't know how. So, without further ado,  here it is .