VMMaker (was: RE: [Win32][VM]: Update to 3.1 Alpha build 4)

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Sat May 5 05:36:45 UTC 2001


"Raab, Andreas" <Andreas.Raab at disney.com> is widely believed to have written:

> > > What *has* changed, however, are some of the tools that I am using.
> > What, you didn't use the VMMaker? :-)
> 
> You know, actually I considered it but it turned out that I would have to
> rewrite the entire make file, change the entire directory structure and also
> to rename all the plugins back to something that works and at this point it
> was just tons easier to just use "Interpreter translate".
Picky, picky!
The revised directory tree is obviously trivial to do; just a few
move-arounds of files, and at that only of the handwritten platform
specific files. To the best of my knowledge (derived from doing Acorn
and linux versions) no file needs actual altering for this part.
Rewriting the makefile I imagine has to be true, but it wasn't much
(ten/twenty lines) for Acorn or linux, and with a little work the
VMMaker could probably for much of it anyway. Sadly I don't have any PC
to try it out on myself.
Rename which plugins? Did I miss some? None of the renames are actually
essential I think, but as Ian pointedly remarks in his makefile stuff,
some of the current names are really pretty dumb, so I 'fixed' them all
to be *Plugin.
> 
> Oh, and by the way, a *very* useful initialization method for VMMaker would
> be #initializeAllInternalBut:/initializeAllExternalBut: aFewToLeaveOut.
Good idea, though I was kinda hoping somebody might do a simple tickbox
UI that would make that really easy to handle. A config save/load would
be good too.
> Ah, yes, and one thing that was quite confusing: Why are some plugins
> simply not translated even if you do use
> #initializeAllInternal/External?!
Like much of the above, explained in the fine manual; basically there is
quite an odd mix of plugin code sitting around and some decent way of
discriminating reliably between classes to translate (FilePlugin et al.)
and those to not translate (FlippyArray2, TestInterpreterPlugin etc.) is
needed. Until then there is a literal list in VMMaker
class>providedPlugins, a method that openly declares its awfulness.
Again, I think a UI would ameliorate the problem somewhat, though it is
a good question as to which of the oddity plugin classes ought to be
removed:- FlippyArrayPlugin2? FooPlugin2 ?  TestOSAPlugin? Might it not
be time to give TestInterpreterPlugin a more permanent name?

And actually of course, you were quite right not to use VMMaker for a vm
intended as a minor update for use with images without the rename
update, though it would be easy to work around that if it were to be
considered useful. It was only really a minor tweak of your nose. No
harm intended, obviously.

tim
PS Hmm, that random sigline generator is being too clever again...
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.





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