According to our web site, the current release is Squeak 5.1, and trunk
is Squeak 6.0alpha.

I think it has been about a year since the last official release, and
a lot of great stuff has gone into trunk during that time. So it would
be good to put out an official release some time soon. For that we should
identify a person to serve as release manager to make it happen. I expect
we will discuss this in our board meeting next week, but input (and volunteers
or nominations) from anyone in the community would certainly be welcome.

If we do something in the near term, then it would make sense to me if
it was called Squeak 5.2. And if that happens, it would be good to incorporate
full support for ephemerons and read only objects into whatever release
comes next after that.

In the mean time, my view would be that any changes for support of read
only objects and ephemerons should be introduced as soon as possible
regardless of the release schedule, just as long as this can be done
without requiring incompatible VM changes. I'm not quite clear on whether
that is the case here. But basically what I am trying to say is let's
move this forward as quickly as possible. If it is a change that would
cause pain for general users of Squeak, then hold off until after then
next release, and let's make sure that next release happens soon.

So +1 for your proposal, but maybe call it 5.2 rather than 5.5, and let's
find a release manager and make it happen.

And just so we do not forget - The last release was still focused on
32 bit images. The 64 bit system is not longer experimental, so we need
to publicize this better in our next release and document the limitations
so that users are aware that they will not be able run their 64 bit image
on a 32 bit platform.

Dave

On Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 09:57:52AM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
>     we're moving close to a new Squeak release.  There are some issues to
> discuss before we decide  exactly what and when to release.  I have two
> issues that I would like people's opinions on.
> 
> 1. the VM can be compiled with support for read-only objects, and indeed
> Pharo is already doing this.  Were we to enable read-only object support we
> could introduce read-only bindings.  I have this code ready to go, but the
> current Squeak VM does not include read-only object support.  We could go
> ahead and release without read-only object support or enable read-only
> object support in the VM, push the new VMs out and enable read-only
> literals.  It would then take a few days for everyone to test their code
> and fix issues with read-only literals.  For example, code such as
> 
> a := { 'one ' . 'two ' . 'three ' }.
> a do: [:e | e at: e size put: (Character value: 0)].
> 
> must be rewritten, e.g. as
> 
> a := #('one ' 'two ' 'three ' ) collect: [:ea| ea copyReplaceAll: Character
> space asString with: Character null asString].
> 
> and the classic
> 
> '' writeStream
> 
> as
> 
> '' copy writeStream
> 
> i.e. literals are read-only but copies of literals are not.
> 
> 2. the current VM, Monticello and the ClassBuilder has full support for
> ephemerons, which provide instance based finalization. For example, if a
> file that is the key of some ephemeron in a registration dictionary, then,
> with a suitable finalization process, the VM will arrange that the
> ephemeron gets sent finalize when the file is only referenced from
> ephemeris, and then the ephemeron can finalize the file itself, flushing
> any buffered characters and closing the file's descriptor. What we have now
> is a copy of the file in a weak registry, which means we finalize the copy
> not the actual file. This limits our ability to write clean file
> implementations. The same applies to several other uses of weak registries.
> Again Pharo is using the facility (and hence we can use their finalization
> process and some of their code).
> 
> So the question is should we hold up the release for these features or
> should we go ahead and somehow arrange that we do address these (and
> other?) issues promptly in a subsequent release?
> 
> Let me make a proposal. We go ahead and make a release with what we have,
> calling it Squeak 5.5, and then follow a plan to provide read-only object
> support, read-only literals, and as mush of the finalizationsystem
> rewritten to use ephemeron (where appropriate) as we can manage by, say,
> September 1. This will be Squeak 6. And the trunk process would update to
> requiring a rad-only-object enabled VM immediately after the 5.5 release.
> 
> _,,,^..^,,,_
> best, Eliot

>