[squeak-dev] Bootstrapping
Bert Freudenberg
bert at freudenbergs.de
Sun Jun 29 18:27:33 UTC 2008
Am 29.06.2008 um 20:08 schrieb Yoshiki Ohshima:
> At Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:48:01 +0200,
> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>> Am 29.06.2008 um 16:51 schrieb Randal L. Schwartz:
>>
>>>>>>>> "Bert" == Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> writes:
>>>
>>> Bert> No it would not. The main issue for them is that you have to
>>> start from what
>>> Bert> they perceive as "binary blob" which is monkey-patched into
>>> newer versions.
>>>
>>> The C compiler would fit the same definition, by that reasoning.
>>
>>
>> No. You need a C compiler, true, but it builds the next C compiler
>> from text sources only, it does not clone itself.
>
> Come to think of it, we don't have to write the bootstrapper in
> another language. They already accept Squeak VM, so we can write the
> Smalltalk-to-CompiledMethod compiler in Slang (even better; write it
> in OMeta and generate Slang), and generate a modified VM that has
> different main(). That main() reads the "source" files, compile them
> (by using the memory management in ObjectMemory), and write the result
> to file. (Yes, you need a C compiler^^;)
>
> Isn't it sound a bit more doable?
A bit. But I suspect getting classes and methods assembled into an
image is not even half the work. We'll have to create objects, too,
that were manually assembled (I'm thinking of the PaintBox prototype
for example). Recreating a full Etoys image would still be a major
effort, since many parts would have to be rewritten to actually be
bootstrappable.
- Bert -
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