[Vm-dev] Squeak/Pharo VM fork history

K K Subbu kksubbu.ml at gmail.com
Mon May 18 07:54:32 UTC 2020


On 18/05/20 1:25 am, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>>> To clarify about the VM fork: few years ago, the transpiled C
>>> source code of the VM, along with the genuine C parts and core
>>> plugins, were migrated to GitHub under the common name
>>> OpenSmalltalk VM, to be shared by Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and
>>> Newspeak.
>> The src directories in opensmalltalk-vm github are just caches -
>> meant to avoid transpilation overheads during repeated builds.
> No, they are not just caches.  They are also versioned artifacts that
> eliminate the possibility that translation at a later time might
> produce different results.  They have many advantages other than
> this, such as quicker Bude Yoon tor finding bugs, the ability to
> build a vm without having a full VMMaker build environment, etc.

Eliot,

That's precisely what I meant by "transpilation overheads". I didn't 
want to expand on that because I just wanted to point out that VMMaker 
is the original source and not the github. So copying git files is not 
really a "source fork". It is a build hack. Any updates to this git 
outside of transpilation will only be local to a build and will be 
overwritten by next transpilation.

Regards .. Subbu


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