[Vm-dev] VM support for older image formats (was: Simulating the Cog V3 VM)

[Eliot Miranda]

Phil, Juan, and other Cuis users,

    please accept my apology.  I have meant to help you port Cuis to Spur for many months now and I always forget through pressure of work.  I can imagine if must be frustrating but please keep nagging me.  My immediate task in a 64-bit port of the Newspeak system at Cadence.  Perhaps once that's done I'll have time to attend to the Cuis Spur bootstrap.  Again I do apologize.

_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)

> On May 11, 2016, at 7:44 PM, Phil (list) <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dave,
> 
>> On Wed, 2016-05-11 at 19:50 -0400, David T. Lewis wrote:
>> Even the very earliest Squeak images can be run on SqueakJS:
>> 
>>   http://try.squeak.org/
>> 
>> The traditional interpreter VM works well for images going back to
>> about Squeak 3.2, and up to but not including Spur images. Official
>> (but now outdated) releases are on squeakvm.org, and on Linux (not so
>> sure of other platforms), it is straightforward to compile an up to
>> date version yourself (*):
>> 
>>   http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6354
> 
> Your efforts to keep the ability to build the older VMs alive is
> greatly appreciated!  I've actually fired up some early 2.x and 3.x
> images within the last month as they still have both historical and
> reference value.
> 
>> The Cog VMs run recent V3 images, as long as they are closure
>> enabled.
>> That goes back a number of years now.
> 
> Yep, and that's why we (Cuis) are still on Stack and Cog V3 VMs.  We
> will be until the changes necessary to forward migrate to Spur are
> worked out.  We'll get there eventually, but as none of us have heavy
> VM expertise so it takes a while.
> 
>> Dave
>> 
>> (*) If you try this, I would appreciate feedback as to whether you
>> encounter any problems. I think that it is a 10 minute recipe for a
>> first time VM builder, but I have never had any feedback to confirm
>> or deny that claim. If it works or does not work for you, please
>> speak up :-)
> 
> I can confirm that your docs worked perfectly for a 32-bit build on
> Debian 8.  (~10 minutes if you include waiting time for downloading and
> building inside of a VM... <60 seconds of my time :-)
> 
> Thanks,
> Phil