SqueakJS – A Squeak VM in JavaScript
One thing that&#x27;s amazing about SqueakJS (and one reason this VM inside another VM runs so fast) is the way Vanessa Freudenberg elegantly and efficiently created a hybrid Smalltalk garbage collector that works with the JavaScript garbage collector.<p>SqueakJS: A Modern and Practical Smalltalk That Runs in Any Browser<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freudenbergs.de&#x2F;bert&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Freudenberg-2014-SqueakJS.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freudenbergs.de&#x2F;bert&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Freudenberg-201...</a><p>&gt;The fact that SqueakJS represents Squeak objects as plain
JavaScript objects and integrates with the JavaScript garbage collection (GC) allows existing JavaScript code to interact with Squeak
objects. This has proven useful during development as we could
re-use existing JavaScript tools to inspect and manipulate Squeak
objects as they appear in the VM. This means that SqueakJS is not
only a “Squeak in the browser”, but also that it provides practical
support for using Smalltalk in a JavaScript environment.<p>&gt;[...] a hybrid garbage collection scheme to allow Squeak object
enumeration without a dedicated object table, while delegating
as much work as possible to the JavaScript GC, [...]<p>&gt;2.3 Cleaning up Garbage<p>&gt;Many core functions in Squeak depend on the ability to enumerate objects of a specific class using the firstInstance and
nextInstance primitive methods. In Squeak, this is easily implemented since all objects are contiguous in memory, so one can simply scan from the beginning and return the next available instance.
This is not possible in a hosted implementation where the host does
not provide enumeration, as is the case for Java and JavaScript.
Potato used a weak-key object table to keep track of objects to enumerate them. Other implementations, like the R&#x2F;SqueakVM, use the
host garbage collector to trigger a full GC and yield all objects of a
certain type. These are then temporarily kept in a list for enumeration. In JavaScript, neither weak references, nor access to the GC
is generally available, so neither option was possible for SqueakJS.
Instead, we designed a hybrid GC scheme that provides enumeration
while not requiring weak pointer support, and still retaining the
benefit of the native host GC.<p>&gt;SqueakJS manages objects in an old and new space, akin to a
semi-space GC. When an image is loaded, all objects are created
in the old space. Because an image is just a snapshot of the object
memory when it was saved, all objects are consecutive in the image.
When we convert them into JavaScript objects, we create a linked
list of all objects. This means, that as long as an object is in the
SqueakJS old-space, it cannot be garbage collected by the JavaScript
VM. New objects are created in a virtual new space. However, this
space does not really exist for the SqueakJS VM, because it simply
consists of Squeak objects that are not part of the old-space linked
list. New objects that are dereferenced are simply collected by the
JavaScript GC.<p>&gt;When full GC is triggered in SqueakJS (for example because the
nextInstance primitive has been called on an object that does not
have a next link) a two-phase collection is started. In the first pass,
any new objects that are referenced from surviving objects are added
to the end of the linked list, and thus become part of the old space.
In a second pass, any objects that are already in the linked list, but
were not referenced from surviving objects are removed from the
list, and thus become eligible for ordinary JavaScript GC. Note also,
that we append objects to the old list in the order of their creation,
simply by ordering them by their object identifiers (IDs). In Squeak,
these are the memory offsets of the object. To be able to save images
that can again be opened with the standard Squeak VM, we generate
object IDs that correspond to the offset the object would have in an
image. This way, we can serialize our old object space and thus save
binary compatible Squeak images from SqueakJS.<p>&gt;To implement Squeak’s weak references, a similar scheme can
be employed: any weak container is simply added to a special list
of root objects that do not let their references survive. If, during a
full GC, a Squeak object is found to be only referenced from one of
those weak roots, that reference is removed, and the Squeak object
is again garbage collected by the JavaScript GC.