[squeak-dev] Image conversions (was Re: Squeak Trunk V3 Update Stream)

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Thu Feb 15 19:07:59 UTC 2018


On 15 February 2018 at 18:50, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 07:05:26AM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> > Hi David, Hi Casey,
> >
> > > On Feb 15, 2018, at 6:05 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:33:59AM +0100, Tobias Pape wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> On 15.02.2018, at 07:46, Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de>
> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> For the long term, I would love to have an "Export as..." in the
> world menu of a regular (trunk) image. :-)
> > >>
> > >> Or even better: have the vm detect whether it loads an image matching
> its bit-ness (is this a word?)
> > >> and if not, convert it (maybe with a "please wait" info). I mean, it
> works for RSqueak and IIRC SqueakJS???
> > >>
> > >> -t
> > >
> > > These are great ideas!
> > >
> > > Does anybody know any smart grad students looking for a challenging
> project?
> >
> >
> > My dream conversion would be taking the Smalltalk-80 image I have from
> the original Xerox tape and replacing its compiler and other relevant
> methods so that it used closures and Spur, and a conventional
> file/directory interface, but otherwise remained the simple bitblt based
> system with some 2000 methods and 200 classes.
> >
> > Such a system is great for learning because it is small enough for one
> person to learn all of it.  Of course it would be a bit bigger; the closure
> compiler is more complicated, but not by much.  But projects like replacing
> repainting windows by windows with a backing store, are afternoon projects
> in this context.
>
> That idea is crazy enough that it just might work :-)
>
> So just to explore the idea: If someone wanted to actually do this, how
> might they proceed?
>
> My guess would be that the fastest path might be to start with a modern
> oscog VMMaker image, and write enough new simulator support to handle the
> object memory and interpreter of the original Xerox system.
>
> If the old Xerox image could be hosted in a modern simulator, then it
> should be possible to translate the object image into a format that could
> be executed directly on a Spur VM.
>
> But that is only a piece of the problem, because such an image would be
> useless without the updated compiler and file system interface, and I can't
> quite picture how those bootstrapping steps might be done.
>
> Dave
>

The Squeak 2.2. Mini image is just 200 classes and 4500 methods.

- Bert -
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