Turning the Cog

Qwaq Inc. has recently engaged Eliot Miranda (a deeply experienced developer of Smalltalk-based VM implementations) to write a fast Croquet VM for release under the open source Croquet license. Named Cog, this VM will dynamically compile Smalltalk bytecodes to machine code and execute this machine code instead of interpreting bytecode. All of this will be transparent to the programmer and should execute pure Smalltalk code 10 to 20 times faster than the current Squeak VM used by Croquet. With planned further optimization, the new Croquet VM should significantly exceed the Smalltalk-based VisualWorks VM performance. Eliot expects to release the first fast version within a year and has set up a blog so that you can follow his progress.