[squeak-dev] Smalltalk images considered harmful

K. K. Subramaniam subbukk at gmail.com
Thu May 22 20:22:42 UTC 2008


On Thursday 22 May 2008 6:47:28 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> I think the problem with Thomas of the Debian team is not that he does  
> not understand what an image is (José and I explained in e-mail, and I  
> also had a chat with him). But the huge monolithic image does not fit  
> well with the regular package maintenance procedure. Given a new  
> image, how can one be sure what's in it, and what changed? It's all  
> based on trust, with little verification
Huge images are a problem for Squeak developers too in terms of increased I/O 
and network transfer times. Slim images benefits everyone. Strictly speaking, 
a developer's image is much larger than the *.image file since the image 
contains pointers into two other blobs - *.changes and *.sources. The last 
blob is about 17MB and doesn't change between different images, so it is huge 
win to factor it out. If we apply the same factoring approach to large 
collections (sound library? pool dictionaries?) then maintenance could become 
easier. Bulky stable image segments could be hived off into project files and 
then merged into a single image at "build" time or even at run time.

Has anyone analyzed space consumption and distribution patterns of object from 
a image file? What explains the near doubling of image size between 3.2 and 
3.8?

Subbu



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