Highly Portable Smalltalk

HPS stood for "Highly Portable Smalltalk". Some people might say it stood for "High Performance Smalltalk", but they'd be wrong. Anyway, HPS was the code name for ParcPlace's Smalltalk-80 implementation begun in 1986 to replace the inaptly named PS or PortableSmalltalk that ParcPlace took as its inheritance from PARC.

The first version of HPS was shipped as ObjectWorks version 2.5. Like PS,it used Deutsch-Schiffman DynamicTranslation? (now called "JustInTimeCompilation"), in-line caching and multiple representations of contexts. Unlike PS, it was written in C (rather than MC68000 assembly) and it had a generation scavenging storage manager (rather than using deferred reference counting).

HPS was developed primarily by PeterDeutsch (code generation), FrankJackson? (storage management) and AllanSchiffman (everything else). Many other people worked on it later; deserving special mention are David Liebs, Steve Dahl, Elgin Lee, Russ Pencin, Ron Carter and Jan Bottorf.

Now maintained by EliotMiranda for Cincom and included as SourceCode with the commercial edition of CincomSmalltalk

-- contributed by AllanSchiffman on 3-Aug-02.

CategorySmalltalk