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.

Table of Contents

• Building the Virtual Machine
  • Flavors
  • Different VM Configurations
  • Build Options
  • Building in Different Platforms
    • General Build Information
    • Detailed Build Guide
    • Detailed Development Guide
    • Windows Build Information
      • Building on Windows
    • OSX Build Information
      • Compiling OSX third party dependencies
      • Building in OSX
    • Linux Build Information
      • Open Build Service
      • Installing Pharo into Linux Distributions
      • Cross Compiling ARM64 in Ubuntu
      • Cross Compiling ARM32 in Ubuntu
      • Compiling in Manjaro ARM64
      • Compiling in Fedora
      • Compiling in Debian
      • Compiling in Ubuntu/Mint
      • Compiling i686 third party dependencies
      • Compiling ARM64 third party dependencies
      • Compiling ARM32 third party dependencies
  • Troubleshooting
• Continuous Integration
• Developer documentation
  • Source Directory Structure
  • Simulation Environment
  • Slang
  • JIT compiler
  • Debugging - GDB
  • Debugging Windows ARM64 builds with Visual Studio
• How to contribute
• Glossary