It looks like dead code to me. It sets a variable that is no longer referenced. My guess would be that it sets a flag that Ian used in early development of the Unix Squeak VM, possibly it was related to the jitter VMs that he was doing in early days.

You can see the option being set in the sqUnixMain.c module back in 2003: http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/unix/vm/sqUnix...

Earlier version control for the VM was kept on SourceForge, I don't know if that is still available for historical purposes.

In any case, as far as I can tell it is just an option setting that once meant something, but that has not been used for a long time.

Dave

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:09:28AM +0200, stes@PANDORA.BE wrote:

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I've already asked this question on vm-dev, with no replies so far.

Perhaps someone knows here on this list ...

I wonder whether anyone is using the SQUEAK_SPY environment variable, or knows what this is doing.

In the VM source code :

platforms/unix/vm-display-X11/sqUnixX11.c:int withSpy= 0; platforms/unix/vm-display-X11/sqUnixX11.c: if (getenv("SQUEAK_SPY")) withSpy= 1; platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixMain.c: int withSpy= 0; platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixMain.c: else if (!strcmp(argv[0], VMOPTION("spy"))) { withSpy = 1; return 1; }

Also I wonder why both .c files (sqUnixX11.c and sqUnixMain.c) both define the same global variable (they both define withSpy).

Maybe the VM -spy option is somehow related to spyOn: and MessageTally ??

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/4210

It's just a guess. I don't immediately see any documentation on this on wiki.squeak.org.

Perhaps -spy is related to Squeak Performance Tuning ?

Is anyone using -spy or SQUEAK_SPY ?

David Stes

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