The Potato virtual machine project is an implementation of the Squeak virtual machine in the Java programming language. Potato is a direct derivative of JSqueak, which was developed by Dan Ingalls at Sun.
Potato started out as a coursework assignment in a virtual machines course taught by our group. At the start of the assignment, JSqueak was able to run Squeak 2.2 mini images in black and white. After some intense hacking, some of which involved Dan Ingalls, Potato can now load Squeak 2.2 images with 32 bit colour depth.
The idea of the Potato project is to evaluate the possibilities of implementing a virtual machine for a high-level dynamic programming language such as Smalltalk on top of another high-level programming language virtual machine, namely the Java VM. This allows for various interesting optimisations, such as exploitation of the rich standard Java API. The Potato blog is dedicated to documenting the ongoing efforts.
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