approaching Spoon

[Matthew Fulmer]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 10:11:16AM +0100, Norbert Hartl wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> today evening I decided to play once more with spoon.
> On the net I found your description about building a
> vm with naiad support.
> 
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2007-July/000214.html
> 
> I can't say I understand the whole spoon process. There are a lot
> of things floating around:
> 
> 1. a modified image (spoon processor changes) to build a vm with naiad
>   support
> 2. the naiad vm
> 3. minimal memory image
> 4. control image
> 
> Maybe you are able to clarify some questions:
> 
> - Is 1. needed after the vm is built?

I really have no idea what the right way to build the VM is. I
gave up trying spoon out of frustration with not being able to
build a VM for some purpose. I don't remember the details

> - What is the control image?

I believe this is a vanilla 3.9 image with naiad.st and naiad.pr
loaded. It's purpose was to try remotely browsing the contents
of the minimal memory image via its wormhole server. It needs a
VM that can run a 3.9 image and has the Flow plugin loaded.
Building such a VM made me crazy, and I never got it working.

> I thought it is sufficient to be able to run the memory.image in an
> interpreter simulator and to control the rest from the image of the
> interpreter simulator. Is that correct?

>From the interpreter simulator, you can do some debugging on the
low-level execution of the memory.image, like what process or context is
active, but not do anything high-level, like see smalltalk code
or execute smalltalk statements. The interface between the
interpreter simulator and the image is just the bytecodes and
the raw object format, so you can try to debug, but it is really
low-level.

The interpreter simulator really had nothing to do with the
problem I expressed in that email.

> However if I'm trying to run the memory image in the interpreter
> simulator the image eats my cpu and does nothing. All I can see
> is the "Relocating object pointers" Morph. My cpu goes on 100%
> and that's it. 

That is all that is supposed to happen. The memory image has no
UI in it, so it does no screen drawing or anything. You should
be able to connect to the web server the minimal image is
running (don't remember what port; it's in the README)

> Did you make any progress since writing the post?

No, I haven't messed with spoon in a while. I am developing
DeltaStreams and plan on using that to make something cool with
spoon, naiad, and kettle when I have more code to fling around.

> thanks in advance,

Sure. Have fun

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808