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

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Feb 15 23:31:17 UTC 2018


On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 08:07:59PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 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 -

And of course Mini Squeak 2.2 is the first image that is loaded when connecting
wto http://try.squeak.org. It is small, fast, and has a satisfyingly retro
aesthetic :-)

But speaking of the Mini image, I think that it is supposed to be housed
in the files.squeak.org site in the 2.2 directory. But I am getting XML parser
errors with some sort of dire warning about font copyrights. Is there a problem
with our ftp server?

Of course there is a copy in the GitHub SqueakJS repository too, but we should
be able to find it on files.squeak.org too.

Dave



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