Ah, I have a bias opinion for an answer, but I'll not discuss that here.
However the BIG issue for the 3.8.x and earlier series of macintosh carbon VM is their behaviour for opening a closure image. What you will find is that if you attempt to open a closure image the squeak.app will start then terminate It will print a diagnostic message to the console which you can see via Apple's Console.app found in Applications/Utilities.
07/03/09 11:11:51 AM [0x0-0x8d08d].org.squeak.Squeak[1894] This interpreter (vers. 6502) cannot read image file (vers. 6504). 07/03/09 11:11:51 AM [0x0-0x8d08d].org.squeak.Squeak[1894] Press CR to quit...
The reason for this behaviour is that 15 some years back John Maloney coded up the version checking logic and there was a question what to do now. At the time CodeWarrior under os-7.5.x would helpfully put up a dialog window if you printed to the *console* and did a getchar for the answer, that code has moved forward for years now and no-one really has tested until now.
Interestingly the getchar on os-x does not block and returns null and we terminate the VM, but the behaviour is confusing if you don't understand what is going on.
I will at some point push out a 3.8.22 VM that should put up a more helpful dialog message, but people who have older VMs underfoot should realize this behaviour should be an indication that perhaps your VM is too old.
On 7-Mar-09, at 8:12 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:
Bert Freudenberg wrote:
John bumped the Mac VM's major version to 4 to signify closure support. Maybe the other platforms should follow suit?
I figured v4 would signify the Stack VM or later as this VM will no longer be able to run v3 images. The current set of VMs are fully backwards compatible so I consider them logically to be v3 VMs.
But I'm willing to reconsider if people prefer the v4 terminology.
Cheers,
- Andreas
-- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================