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