[Newbies] Re: squeak and the jvm

Benjamin Schroeder benschroeder at acm.org
Wed Nov 8 19:33:49 UTC 2006


On Nov 8, 2006, at 12:43 PM, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:

> Hi Mike,
>
> on Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:13:17 +0100, you wrote:
>> Yes, this is what I was referring to.  Hotswapping is sort of there
>> for the jvm.  When I use Eclipse, it tries to hotswap.  Sometimes it
>> fails.  Sometimes it doesn't.  But, referring the criteria in my  
>> reply
>> to Ron's email, would loosing guaranteed hotswapping cause Squeak to
>> "lose it's soul?"  I dunnknow.  I'm a newbie.  And I don't write
>> Squeak for a living.
>
> Having read your response to Ron's I think that all you ask for is  
> to compile Squeak source code into JVM bytecode such that your  
> application code can access the existing Java API's.

If what you want to do is to access Java objects from Squeak (and  
vice versa), you could also consider running the two VMs in parallel,  
and setting up a sort of "bridge" to communicate between them. This  
might help you even if your eventual goal is to port Squeak to run in  
JVM bytecode.

We did a bridge for Squeak and .NET:

	http://www.saltypickle.com/SqueakDotNet

That program is a port of a similar bridge we did for Ruby. In both  
cases, we started out running the two VMs in different processes, and  
just sending socket-based messages between them; later, we got things  
working in a single process. Getting the basics up and running for  
one of these things is actually pretty quick, in my experience.

I think that the bridge approach has a lot to recommend it, in that  
you retain the advantages of both environments, and can use the  
regular production VM of both. (There are of course still some  
difficulties.)

Benjamin Schroeder



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