Remaining to-do items for 3.7

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Tue Feb 17 02:52:44 UTC 2004


On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 04:58:14PM -0800, Timothy Rowledge wrote:
> 
> On Feb 16, 2004, at 4:42 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:
> > Sure, but given both options I don't understand the bias towards using 
> > a plugin that depends on an external library.  Except in cases where 
> > it's impossible to get adequate performance in pure Squeak, shouldn't 
> > the bias go the other way?
> My general rule is to go for the way that involves least work. If the 
> case were that using a C pcre library (and by the way, that 32kb plugin 
> size does include the size of the compiled pcre library) and some 
> methods to call it  was available and a 'pure Smalltalk' package was 
> not - I'd go for the former. Somebodyelse did the work, maintains it 
> etc- slamdunk.
> 
> In this particular case there _is_ a purely Smalltalk solution that 
> sounds quite plausible. What size does it add to the image? It's 
> probably smaller, but maybe not. What sort of memory usage does it 
> cause in running?
> 
> An interesting option might be to see if the two can work together so 
> that the plugin can be optional.
> 
> It's not something I'm going to make a call on but I do need to know an 
> answer fairly soon so I can drop the plugin from the VMMaker package if 
> needed before the 3.7 release.

The Way of Least Work would be to leave the plugin in the VMMaker
package. It's certainly not going to hurt anything, and any debate
on which regex package(s) to use can all take place on the image
side anyway.

I have not really looked at the two packages, but I won't let that
stop me from venturing an uninformed opinion. My guess is that the
important differences between the two packages will be functional,
and that most folks will will not care one way or the other about
the performance. The compiled plugin is likely to have functional
capabilities that are not available in the all-Smalltalk version,
and somebody might care about that.

So leave the plugin in VMMaker. Worst case you can take it out in
some future release.

Dave




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