Similarities & differences between Digitalk Smalltalk and LSWVST
Digitalk Smalltalk was a commercial Smalltalk under Windows and OS/2. It's
development was stopped in 1994 but it is still used by succesfull products
until today. The Digitalk-VM compiled Smalltalk-Bytecodes "just-in-time" & had a
deep Windows and OS/2 integration.
- Bytecode of LSWGVM 2 is compatible ( LSWVST has additional bytecodes )
- Primitive-Numbers are compatible ( LSWVST has more
primitives )
- Digitalk-Images can be loaded
- Digitalk-SLL's can be loaded
- continuously suppported enhanced - ported to other platforms &
Processor architectures
- written in pure Assembler Virtual-Machine size is about
200 KB ( incl. JIT-Engine )
- better JIT-Architecture ( no re-jitting required )
- no Jit-size limittation
- uses only Unicode-API in Virtual-Machine
- runs on Windows Phone
- not dependent on Microsoft MSVCRT.DLL
- only one EXE / DLL ( no v.exe Stub as PE-Image Store required ) -
dependent on the appartment model
- no further DLL's required
- doesn't support 16 Bit
- doesn't support OS/2
- doesn't support obsolete architectures like Win95 / Win32s
- Object-Image can be stored in PE-Section of Virtual-Machine as a
separate file or as resource.
- SLL's are loaded from LSWVST start-Directory rather to be located
from System-Path.
- CompiledMethod's Bytecode can be stripped of and jitted-Code can
be saved in Object-Image.
- No Global-Functions in VM
- No Differences in Runtime & Development-Time mode ( Primitive 77 returns false )
- supports Multithreading
- supports debugging of recursive callbacks
- no limitation of Callback-Table size
- supports multiple Object-Spaces with different Garbage-Collection
- Float support for 32 Bit and 80 Bit
- Can Host .NET CLR/DLR
- Runs reliable on current Windows versions
- support AES-256 encrypted Images & SLLs
- support Huffman compression before encryption
- sophisticated In-Process Debugging using Single-Step mode
- working Non-Blocking API
- CPP FFI
- several times faster than Digitalk VM
-