Is it worth releasing now?

[bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Tween writes:
 > Hi Bryce,
 > The benchmark numbers are looking good. Congratulations, and keep up the good
 > work.

Thanks.

 > If you decide to release, then I can build a new Win32 VM, if necessary. Just
 > let me know the appropriate package versions.

Thanks again. I plan to fix a few more bugs then release. Having both
pre-built Windows and Linux VMs would be great.

Theres some methods that fail to compile due to compiler bugs that
don't cause crashes.  I want to remove these errors before releasing.
One big advantage of the register allocator is it's liveness analysis
is very good at catching bugs at compile time.

It might also be sensible to move all the VM code into the Exupery
version of VMMaker, that way it's should be easier to track when a new
VM is needed. At the moment, the only way is to either use a released
version or to build one yourself. It's hard to know when the released
pre-built VMs are no longer useful for development versions.

 > Will you be creating an image with Exupery pre-installed, or only the packages
 > for people to install themselves?  I like to download images with everything
 > set-up, so that I know I have the right versions of everything, installed in the
 > correct order. But I understand why others may prefer to do their own install.

I could, I haven't really thought about packaged images. Exupery
itself shouldn't have any dependencies on other external packages.
The tests do have a few dependencies. An image set up for Exupery
development could be useful, that would just leave people to get the
right VM source, or a prebuilt VM. It could drop the barriers to
getting started.

 > (Off-topic : How did the UK smalltalk meet go on Friday/Saturday? I couldn't
 > make it due to attending a wedding, but hopefully I'll be able to go to the next
 > one)

Both days went well. I hope you enjoyed the wedding.

Bryce