Dear John,

I'd like to thank you for your reply - it has clarified the distinction between
the VMs most aptly.

Using OS X from a largely Darwin-orientated perspective, I - like Todd -
welcome the 'familarity' offered by a Unix VM (such as an affinity for UFS
filename convention, rather than HFS+, and the transparency between my VM
running on Panther and those on OpenBSD/Linux). Familiar compilation procedure
is also a convenience. All of this is quite incidental in the greater scheme of
things - but if the choice is there, and it makes sense ....

Anyway, I digress! Thanks again for all the replies on this thread; as you
suggest, John, I'll do performance tests when and where necessary. Suffice it
to say that your Cocoa VM is to hand as well, should limitations of running a
Unix VM become apparent in the near future.

Warm regards,
Marc


--- John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:
> Ooo a difficult question but I'll point that the mac carbon vm is more  
> mac aware.
> 
> a) supports apple events and apple script.
> b) uses HFS+ file names
> c) knows about HFS+ aliases
> d) Much better integration with os-x unicode text services.
> e) Support 1/2/4 bit video
> f) Supports multiple windows
> 
> Uses
> unix file i/o
> unix core audio
> unix tcp
> 
> Historically it gets updated more frequently, and will migrate over  
> time to
> 
> a) unix file names, (perhaps both)
> b) more of the unix plugin support
> c) perhaps more of the unix cocoa logic.
> 
> You must keep in mind the mac VM is a single source that compiles for  
> mac os 7.5.5 thru to os-x 10.4, however at some point
> we will make the os-9.x source a legacy system.
> 
> Coming up is:
> 
> a) More meta key support for Tweak
> b) Command line parm support
> c) Headless (maybe) things lurk for that from 5 years ago and need  
> revisiting.
> 
>  From a performance viewpoint things should be the same, benchmarking  
> your application is of course a wise thing to do.
> Stability I would hope be the same across all VM, the VM developers as  
> a group hope this is the case.
> 
> PS Yet another reminder, any os-x crash logs should be emailed to me so  
> we can address stability issues.

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