Andrew,

As Tim has said before, there is no problem whatsoever with having both the
builtin and the external version of the LargeInt plugin. Here's how it
works: The VM looks first if there's an external version of a plugin (e.g.,
a shared library) and if so, always uses that. Only if no external version
is found it looks internally for the plugin.

Meaning that the entire argument about having the plugin external or not is
entirely meaningless. You can at any time just drop an updated shared
library version in the VM folder and from then on your VM will use the
external one.

  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew C. Greenberg [mailto:werdna at gate.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 6:31 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: recipient list not shown
> Subject: Suggestion for distributing Large Integers (Was: DSA changes
> openfor comment)
> 
> 
> >Jerry,
> >
> >What I was trying to say was that if you do NOT have the 
> >LargeIntegers plugin compiled C code (either as a separate shared 
> >library/DLL/.so OR bound into the VM), then the second of these 
> >changesets may dramatically slow down DSA execution. It was not my 
> >impresssion that any of the regularly available VMs currently have 
> >the LargeIntegers plugin internally, although that is certainly a 
> >possibility with the new plugin architecture.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Bob
> 
> I think Bob has this right.  What is more, I'd vote AGAINST having 
> the plugin internally.  There is much room for improvement in speed 
> in the straightforward (but well-executed!) implementation and I 
> would expect large incremental changes to be possible in the near 
> future.
> 
> Since the "fast failure" routines are present, new largeintegers runs 
> just as fast as old squeaks largeintegers, with the plugin giving an 
> added boost.
> 
> At least for 2.8, until largeintegerplugin is slamming fast and 
> unchanging, we probably ought to keep it as an in-image source 
> plugin, with DLL's and shared libraries distributed with the image.
> -- 
> Andrew C. Greenberg		acg at netwolves.com
> V.P. Eng., R&D, 		813.885.2779 (office)
> Netwolves Corporation		813.885.2380 (facsimile)
> www.netwolves.com
>