StarLogo: Architecture and Implementation
Andrew Begel, Brian S. Silverman · 1999
StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring decentralized systems. These systems, which can be described using simple rules, exhibit emergent behaviors which arise out of the interactions of hundreds or thousands of individual computational elements. This paper describes the design, architecture, and implementation of the Macintosh version of StarLogo. We implemented a set of highperformance, multi-processing Logo virtual machines which run on low-end desktop computers. We also explored subtle design issues in context switching and in the unification of several different parallel and serial models of computation. The resulting programming language and environment is efficient, simple to understand, and easy to use, even by novice programmers.