On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 12:24:56AM -0800, Kjell Godo wrote:
picoLARC will have a C like dialect of Lisp in it. ( sourceforge.net ) I would like to write a VM for picoLARC in this dialect of Lisp. So I would like to learn about the Windows version of the Squeak VM. How do I do that? Where do I start? Are there test cases that I could step through? What do I need to compile it? Is there a visual debugger I can use to step through the C parts?
If I could understand it then I would like to help document it. If possible.
You can get some good general background by reading the "Back to the Future" paper: http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html
The book "Squeak, Open Personal Computing and Multimedia" by Guzdial and Rose provides a lot of information (old but still generally valid).
The VM itself is written mosting in Smalltalk, so to browse the code you should load the VMMaker package into your Squeak image. The remaining support code is maintained at http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/, and Windows related information is at http://squeakvm.org/win32/.
I am not aware of anyone using a Squeak VM to directly host some other language, so I can't comment on how feasible this is. However, it is fairly common for people to implement languages such as Lisp or Prolog directly in Squeak itself; in other words, write the language in Smalltalk rather than in C, and run that on the Squeak VM.
Dave