On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 7:32 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

> I need to point out that unless the various communities can start building
> their disparate and diverging images form a micro-kernel image I don't see
> how improved execution technology is going to be adopted by the community.
>  I'm working hard on a VM that will be potentially 10x the current Squeak VM
> for Smalltalk intensive benchmarks.  This VM will be source code compatible
> and bytecode compatible but likely it will not be image compatible as it
> will use a streamlined object representation that doesn't use compact
> classes.  The only way I can see this being adopted by the community at
> large is if the community starts building images form microkernels.

I'm not sure that's true.  Say it becomes yet another fork, separate
(necessarily, at first, because it's a different image format) from
all of the other forks.  As long as most packages can be loaded into
it, it'll get used.  Maybe not by the people doing the forking (by
Scratch, say, or Squeakland), but by the majority of us who have a few
pet packages (in my case, Seaside, OmniBrowser, DabbleDB, etc) that we
can load into nearly any Squeak image and feel at home.  I'm pretty
happy to load those into a MinimalMorphic image this month, a Pharo
image next month, and a Cog image the month after, if there's some
compelling reason to do so - and 10x performance would certainly be
compelling.

A shared microkernel would be nice, but I don't think it's essential
in the short term to drive adoption of a new technology.