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SOAR-ing Away with Smalltalk: Berkeley RISC-III
'Smalltalk On A RISC' and three mysteries!
Before we look at SOAR in more detail, regular readers may recall another architecture, whose development had started a few years earlier, that aimed to accelerate the execution of a high-level language (in this case Ada): Intel’s iAPX432. If, say, an add instruction is initiated on two objects, and one or both of them turn out to be non-integers, the hardware will trap and transfer to a handler that will look up the correct method for the intended operation. Performance analysis suggests that SOAR is not simple enough; several hardware features could be efficiently replaced by instruc- tion sequences constructed by the compiler.
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