Adrian Lienhard wrote:
On Sep 25, 2006, at 21:11 , Brad Fuller wrote:
Brad Fuller wrote:
tim Rowledge wrote:
Wouldn't the VM Crash, that I and others reported, be a reason not to release until fixed? Mantis issue# 0005056
brad
No comment on my question?
I think, the current VM issues would be a good reason to pospone the release.
Unfortunately, as it seems to me, the VM is quite poorly maintained. Probably the main reason being that the maintainers don't have enough time (or, in other words, because they are not paid to fix the problems). Another difficulty is that there are only few people that actually work on the VM (why?).
Here are my excuses:
1. Linux on my system currently has a major major bug that causes my machine to be unusable for all but the most trivial tasks. linux blows donkies.
2. The current Slang > C compiler is very hackish and behaves in very counterintuitive ways, especially with regards to the VM.
3. It is very difficult to understand how the Slang compiler interacts with the system compiler so it would be very very difficult for anyone except the most elite Squeak programmer to work on it. -- One gripe I have with the current (recient?) system compiler is that it doesn't provide information about the scope of a variable (method context versus block context)
4. Because of how the current compiler works, it is impossible to get a working VM that isn't inlined and therefore doing normal code coverage/profiling becomes many times more difficult.
5. Mere mortals don't have access to the current version. Any hacker trying to get the "development" version can't (or at least couldn't last time I checked). You COULD develop based off of what's on the website or try to get the SVN source working (VERY HARD/IMPOSSIBLE -- used to be very reliable), but then you'd have to completely re-do your changes when you finally get a chance to sync with the mainline version. =(