On Mon, 3 Jan 2011, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 11:38 PM, Levente Uzonyi <leves at elte.hu> wrote:
>
>> Quoting Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com>:
>>
>>  Levente wrote:
>>>
>>>  I think we should wait for the new VMs, before releasing the new images.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Levente,
>>>
>>> I did agree, but now that Eliot is on a tear with a new code
>>> generator, the first official release might still be some weeks away.
>>> Someone please correct me if that is a misstatement.
>>>
>>> It seems unlikely 4.2 will be incompatible with whatever ends up being
>>> the first official Cog release.  We should consider pushing it out the
>>> door so we can re-open the trunk to new featurey.
>>>
>>
>> That's right, Cog's recent improvements introduced some instability. So I
>> think we should release Squeak 4.2 with SqueakVM only and postpone the
>> multi-VM release. We can also make the release cycle of Squeak 4.3 shorter
>> to catch up with the two release per year policy and deliver the VM
>> improvements earlier. I'm also sure that a lot of improvements will be done
>> till April/May on both image and VM side.
>>
>
> It would be my preference to release with the Cog VM using the naive
> SimpleStackBasedCogit code generator.  After all that's worth at least 3x
> over the standard VM whereas the unstable StackToregisterMappingCogit is
> only ~ 8% faster than SimpleStackBasedCogit.  It's quite easy for me to
> generate either; the two coexist in the same VMMaker.

Okay, then I guess we should make sure that the two VMs (SqueakVM and
CogVM with SimpleStackBasedCogit) behave the same way in most cases. 
Here's an incomplete list of VM differences:
- CogVM does compile the FloatMathPlugin properly (no crash), but SqueakVM 
doesn't or it does without optimizing the code. Wwe can apply some 
optimization for most methods, see the makefiles of Cog.
- CogVM doesn't support the new finalization scheme
- there's no SoundPlugin in CogVM on windows
- the SocketPlugin of CogVM seems to be missing the new primitives
- AllocationTest >> #testOneGigAllocation is still failing with CogVM
- I'm not sure if SqueakVM has all of the mirror primitives


Levente

P.S.: does the ~8% speedup come from the recompilation benchmark? Is the 
code for the Computer Language Benchmarks Game available somewhere? It
would be good to test the new stdio support with it.

>
> best
> Eliot
>
>
>>
>> Levente
>>
>>
>>>  - Chris
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>