On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 12:24:56AM -0800, Kjell Godo wrote:
> picoLARC will have a C like dialect of Lisp in it.  ( sourceforge.net )  I
> would like to write a VM for picoLARC in this dialect of Lisp.  So I would
> like to learn about the Windows version of the Squeak VM.
> How do I do that?
> Where do I start?
> Are there test cases that I could step through?
> What do I need to compile it?
> Is there a visual debugger I can use to step through the C parts?
> 
> If I could understand it then I would like to help document it.  If
> possible.

You can get some good general background by reading the "Back to the Future"
paper: http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html

The book "Squeak, Open Personal Computing and Multimedia" by Guzdial and
Rose provides a lot of information (old but still generally valid).

The VM itself is written mosting in Smalltalk, so to browse the code you
should load the VMMaker package into your Squeak image. The remaining
support code is maintained at http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/,
and Windows related information is at http://squeakvm.org/win32/.

I am not aware of anyone using a Squeak VM to directly host some other
language, so I can't comment on how feasible this is. However, it is
fairly common for people to implement languages such as Lisp or Prolog
directly in Squeak itself; in other words, write the language in
Smalltalk rather than in C, and run that on the Squeak VM.

Dave