VMMaker( Re: [Squeakfoundation]KCP & 3.6)

[Tim Rowledge]

> > VMMaker does this for a long time already. It's all in the build flags
> which
> > effectively tell the build process which plugins to compile internally and
> > which ones to compile externally. Have a look at the generated
> "plugins.int"
> > and "plugins.ext" file.
Platforms can do different things with the generated code depending on
how they wish to compile; Andreas has a subclass of VMMAker that
arranges the files somewhat differently to Acorn, Unix & Mac and John &
I use a subclass that knows how to put (most of) the globals in a
struct. As Andreas pointed out, the code is identical whether a plugin
is internal or external and it's your makefile that makes the
difference. All the makefiles and project files and blah blah are on
SourceForge for you to scratch your head over. Some of them make sense.

>
>     There may be other new features in VMMaker documented somewhere ?
>     Thanks for the pointers.
The swiki pages are reasonably up to date, I think, but reviewing ones
own writing is as dangerous as ones own code. You just don't see the
gaps.

> 
>     BTW, is there a list of plugins that can be built as external plugins
>     for the upcoming releases ?
I _only_ build plugins as external. For Acorn that actually misses out
quite a few because I still haven't bothered to make sound work (amongst
others). I occasionally do a test build on unix and on my x86 RH7.1
machine building all the unix plugins as external works perfectly well.
My Cray 2S and CDC6600 are fine with external plugins as is my Sinclair
Spectrum.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Manual Writer's Creed:  Garbage in, gospel out.