The Design and Implementation of HoME

HoME is a version of Smalltalk which can be efficiently executed on a multiprocessor and can be executed in parallel by combining a Smalltalk process with a Mach thread and executing the process on the thread. HoME is nearly the same as ordinary Smalltalk except that multiple processes may execute in parallel. Thus, almost all applications running on ordinary Smalltalk can be executed on HoME without changes in their code. HoME was designed and implemented based on the following fundamental policies: 1992 theoretically, an infinite number of processes can become active; (2) the moment a process is scheduled, it becomes active; (3) no process switching occurs; (4) HoME is equivalent to ordinary Smalltalk except for the previous three policies. The performance of the current implementation of HoME running on OMRON LUNA-88K, which had four processors, was measured by benchmarks which execute in parallel with multiple processes. In all benchmarks, the results showed that HoME's performance is much better than HPS on the same workstation.