[Vm-dev] Simulating the Cog V3 VM

[Phil (list)]

Clément,

On Wed, 2016-05-11 at 20:54 +0200, Clément Bera wrote:
> Why are you using V3 ? Is it required for what you are trying to do ?
> Spur is generally better unless you need to use V3 for some reason.

Chiming in since it seemed apropos: it's not by choice... not everyone
has images that have been migrated to Spur (speaking as another Cuis
user, but there are likely other images out there in the same
situation)  So until/unless there is a semi-automatic means of
migrating images as VM changes necessitate it, there will be a small
population of users being left behind on older VMs each time there is a
new image format.

This has been a pain point since the initial releases of Cog: not
everyone is running off of the main Squeak (or even Pharo) images so
every time there is a migration that involves 'just fire up a VMMaker
image and...' and the described steps don't pretty much 'just work',
there are going to be people stuck until they can figure out the
process to migrate.

This isn't necessarily a problem for the VM developers as one possible
position could be 'the VM only supports the latest official Squeak (and
Pharo?) images'.  I don't think that's the position VM folks are taking
so I'd just ask that VM developers keep in mind the reason some of us
are using older VMs is that we're a bit stranded until we can sort out
how to bridge the gap. (we're not VM developers so it is slow going for
us)

It's great to have a fish in the form of a migrated Squeak image.  What
seems to be missing is the fishing lesson that shows us how it was done
rather than having to somewhat reverse engineer the process each time.

Thanks,
Phil