[Vm-dev] Pragmas in VMMaker (was: Cryptography plugins

[David T. Lewis]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 12:42:06AM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> On 7/20/2010 7:10 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> >The current VMMaker for SqueakVM does not use or support pragmas
> >(method annotations). Converting to pragmas makes VMMaker unloadable
> >in older Squeak images.
> 
> But these Squeak images won't run on the generated VM either. There is a 
> point and a time when it's worthwhile to move forward and given that 
> we've just hit a new major version in Squeak it seems quite reasonable 
> to say that the VMMaker 4 series requires Squeak 4 to run on.

Actually many older images do run on the latest VMs. I frequently
run Squeak 3.6 (and sometimes Squeak 2.4) on the latest VM whenever
I want to look at older versions of methods to figure out how they
were originally intended to work. I do expect these older images
to run on newer VMs to the extent possible.

I regularly run VMMaker in a 3.8 image, and I always run that image
on the latest generated VM. But the only real reason I do that is
to verify some degree of backward compatibility for VMMaker updates,
so I don't really know if this matters to anyone else.

Certainly for most of the folks on this list, doing VM work in
a recent Squeak, Pharo, or Cuis image is a reasonable expectation.
On the other hand, there may still be people who for various reasons
prefer to use other images, and it would be nice if the most up to
date VMMaker remains loadable in those images where possible.

If anyone on the list *does* know of a need for VMMaker to work
on images that do not support pragmas, please speak up now so we
do not cause unnecessary problems.

I am also curious about the motivation for using method annotations
here. Is it a style preference, or is there a functional benefit?

Dave