[Squeak-VMdev] GC improvements

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Sat Apr 23 01:34:47 UTC 2005


Hi -

> That's a good idea, though squeaksource doesn't seem to be very reliable right
> now and the guys have mentioned completely reworking it. Perhaps a semi-public
> MC repo on hplab? 

How would we do this? Can we set up some WebDAV or so? Alternatively we 
might be able to host it on source.impara.de but I would have to talk to 
Michael about whether that's considered acceptable use of Impara resources.

>>I talked to Ian - as far as he is concerned the changes are finished.
> 
> Hmm, I had the distinct impression he had things he wanted to do from various
> emails. Not least was some mention of applying the equivalent fixes to make 2Gb
> addresses not be a problem.

I don't know. Ian?

>>There is still lots of stuff to be done but this falls into the 
>>responsibility of either the VM or the plugin maintainer (like, for 
>>example, making the LargeInt plugin work on 64bit).
> 
> And FloatArray.

And lots of others ;-) No doubt about it. This is an incremental process 
which will need plenty of time to work out. One thing we might do though 
is to comment on what plugins are supposed to be 64bit clean and which 
one's aren't.

> Oh and since you used the new VMMakerTool UI layout, was it reasonably logical
> for you? And nobody responded on the issue I raised a while ago about pushing
> this out as the official 3.8 VM package, with the implied requirement to get
> some of the stuff into the 3.8 image RSN.

I certainly liked the VMMaker layout. For someone who's seen VMMaker 
before it's pretty obvious. Except from the issue that changing forth 
and back from/to 64bit does not seem to force regeneration of the VM nor 
does it seem to recreate interp.h (possibly the same problem).

While integrating the GC changes, there were a few things I needed to 
fix though, amongst which were:
- MiscPrimitivePlugin needs to refer to ByteString now
- MessageNode>>asTranslatorNode needs to use #isSymbol
- #(nil true false) in literal arrays
I can send you an MC with the changes if you'd like (or if we had a repo 
I could upload it ;-)

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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