Do Object-Oriented Languages Need Special Hardware Support?
ECOOP '95 Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
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The processors normally used for low cost or embedded applications are not well suited for running Smalltalk, so we created our own using programmable circuits (FPGAs). By creating the software and hardware specifically to work with each other it was possible to simplify both to such a degree that the resulting system is competitive in terms of price/performance compared to solutions with traditional processors, despite the inefficiency of FPGAs relative to custom designs.Both a 16 bit and a 32 bit hardware implementation of Neo Smalltalk were created and illustrate the cost and performance tradeoffs possible in this kind of development. The hardware is defined in terms of objects exchanging messages down to the lowest level, which is an interesting contrast to the traditional bytecoded virtual machines used for Smalltalk, Java and similar languages.