Hi Folks -
Since we're nearing release status I was going over the VM requirements for Croquet to see if we could just go with a bunch of standard VMs or whether we'd need some customized ones. Looking over some recent VMMaker versions, it turns out that there are actually a few important bits and pieces missing from the current VMMaker release which we will want to use in Croquet.
Most importantly, we need the following issues resolved:
1) GC improvements: As discussed in April last year (see http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-browse?list=vm-dev&cmd...) we need the weak array fixes and the GC measurements/tweaks that John did. Those actually turn out to be important for us, if only for analysis of current behavior.
Questions: * What's the general status of those changes? The way I understand the discussion we had back in april, is that John did the adjustments to 64bit and then ... what? * @Tim: Does a VMMaker repository exist by now? Like I was saying back then, I am not alltogether happy with the current situation of new releases just popping up on SqueakMap and with no way of seeing what's in there and how things have developed.
2) Floating point accuracy: As discussed in november last year (see http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-browse?list=vm-dev&cmd...) we need consistent floating point behavior across platforms. I'm actually in the process or rolling out a bunch of tests for it which will be based on fdlibm as described in the above message. One issue that is critical here is that I am planning to checksum (SHA1) the VMs while we are running Croquet to see if the VM is "compliant" (if not we'd run a whole suite of tests to verify the behavior).
Questions: * On Mac and Unix, do we implement getSystemAttribute: -1 to return the full path to the executable? * On Mac and Unix, can one read the executable while running Squeak? I need this to checksum the VM proper.
3) Some Socket fixes: David Reed made some changes for Sockets which turn out to be critical in particular on Macs and Unix systems. I'm still in the process of bundling up these changes but they are fairly straightforward so I don't see many issues with them.
Besides the above three, I have one additional question: What is the general status of the 64bit work right now? Do we consider this complete or work in progress or experimental? Can we rule out any ill effects for the 32bit VMs?
Thanks and Cheers, - Andreas