The Cog VM evolution

  • Thu, August 25, 11:30am – 12:00pm
  • First Name: Clement
  • Last Name: Bera
  • Type: Talk

Abstract: In 2008, the Squeak VM repository made by Dan Ingalls was forked to give birth to the high-performance Cog VM, which is now the default VM for multiple Smalltalk dialects such as Pharo, Squeak or Cuis. Since the fork, new features and performance enhancements have been introduced every year. This talk sums up all the main features and main performance tweaks that were added to the Cog VM in chronological order from 2008 to today. The focus is on the execution engine: Memory management, interpretation, JIT compilation and FFI. The talk lastly discusses the current work in-progress and short-term future work.

Bio: Clément Béra is a PhD student working on virtual machines for object oriented languages at Inria, Lille. He is now focusing on runtime optimisations for the Cog virtual machine and its Smalltalk clients.