Aaron J Reichow reic0024@d.umn.edu wrote:
What I've proposed here before is a Smalltalk server and a C client that does little more than pass the contents of the script and arguments to the server and manage the returned info (exit value, as well a stdout stream).
A snapshot is an extremely fast way to boot -- it's just that the typical Squeak snapshots are pretty big. Stick to images and one VM per script execution. Try it -- it's not as bad as people seem to think! Even unoptimized Squeak starts in less than a second, if its image is cached. It would be better if a script-friendly image was available, but there's not, so too bad.
(Along those lines, a great thing would seem to be to save script images as image segments, and then to have separate script-running and script-development images. The script-running image would be tiny and thus would load quickly).
Two more suggestions for anyone working on this:
1. Don't try to use a text editor. "Text-file" is not the same as "script". Use the regular Smalltalk IDE and make your life nice. Also, save an image, not a fileout.
2. Make sure you have whatever OS-specific extensions are available. If you're talking about "scripting", quite frequently you want to access OS-specific resources. For Mac guys, there is AppleScript stuff in the main image. For Unix and maybe Microsoft guys, there is OSProcess.
-Lex