Hi Collin,

I am currently working on a binary mechanism saving for Monticello.
I am about to release it.

Cheers,
Alexandre

On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 08:32:55PM -0500, Colin Putney wrote:
> 
> On Jun 5, 2004, at 9:17 PM, Lex Spoon wrote:
> 
> >>The first step would be to create a binary format for distributing
> >>Squeak code that would be faster to load than fileOuts - ie, 
> >>decompress
> >>the AST and generate byte code without having to do any parsing. 
> >>Beyond
> >>that would be modifying the interpreter to execute the binary format
> >>directly.
> >
> >Note that there are differences between compressing for distribution 
> >and
> >compressing to save space in an image.  In the former case you need to
> >go all the way down to bytes, but in the latter you can choose to use
> >object pointers in some places.  One place this would likely help is in
> >encoding symbols; you can store #nextPut: as a 4-byte object pointer
> >instead of an 8+ byte string "n e x t P u t :".
> 
> Agreed. The paper I cited earlier mentions replacing strings in the AST 
> with indexes into a string table, as the same strings tend to appear in 
> several places in the tree. So the only real difference would be the 
> table used to intern symbols - for distribution a local symbol table 
> would be included in the file; within the image, we'd just use the 
> regular symbol table.
> 
> I suppose there would be some processing required to load a slim binary 
> method from a file into the equivalent of a CompiledMethod. References 
> to shared variables would be resolved, literals converted to objects, 
> symbols re-interned etc.
> 
> Colin
> 

-- 
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Alexandre Bergel  http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~bergel
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