> robin wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to squeak as well as this list, so hello to everyone.  As a
> child, I had a lot of fun programming systems, using basic, assembly
> language, and C.  As an adult, I've made my living doing a variety of
> technical jobs, including programming c++, perl, and for the last
> couple of years, a load of java.  I found myself drawn to computers as
> a child because I found them fun and a lot more stimulating than most
> of the other things around me.  At work, I've managed to keep learning
> and diversifying my understanding.  I often gain satifaction from my
> work, and I appreciate the beauty and intentions of all the languages
> I've programmed, but I haven't had a lot of real fun with them.  I've
> finally found squeak, and so far I've not been disappointed - it's
> been stimulating, exiting and fun.  I only wish I'd had it as a child.
Welcome to you. 

> I was just wondering how stable I should expect squeak to be in
> general.  I'm running 3.1, feb 28th, and I've had it crash on me a
> couple of times.
> 
> Firstly was when I sent storeString to a set which contained a few of
> my own objects which each referenced a TextMorph.  I'm assuming that I
> indirectly asked the system to 'serialize' a very large number of
> objects - I've had this kind of thing happen in java rmi where a
> careless reference can lead to a whole system being 'sucked' from one
> vm to another.
> 
> More recently, I was experimenting with morphic scripting and the
> system stopped responding after some gesture I made with the scripting
> tiles - dropping one tile onto another or some such action.
> 
> In both cases, the squeak system wasn't totally dead - it was still
> responding as far as windows was concerned.  With the first crash,
> there wasn't much cpu activity but the vm kept growing for a long
> time.  The second time, squeak went to 99% cpu.
Tell us more about your setup.
> 
> Basically, all I'm really asking is how stable should I expect squeak
> to be?  I realise that's a kind of 'how long is a piece of string'
> kind of question,  and I'm quickly learning to save images whenever
> I've done any meaningful work.
Squeak is really stable but then again the image is fragile
and sensitive. I'v dumped quite a few images because the changes I made
would bring up debuggers and bring down the image in all sorts of 
ways. But then again what would not come down when tampered by 
my clumsy brutal hacking :-)
Karl