Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
	The argument "novices to Squeak and Smalltalk need everything in one
	image to see the power of Squeak" which has been made in the past as
	justifying big images is not good enough one for burdening everyone else
	with such an image.

This sounds like a response to a misunderstanding of something I wrote.

Let's face it, for beginners there is *no* difference between a system
with a large library that is loaded (Squeak) and a system with a large
library that is not loaded (Java), except that the former is easier to
navigate in and doesn't require setting up a CLASSPATH.  I have been
reading about Java and thinking about Java since Java 0.9, and I find
the Java libraries overwhelming.

"to see the power of Squeak" has never as far as I know been an issue.
FINDING USEFUL CODE has been.  FINDING HELPFUL EXAMPLES has been.
I have learned a lot, and copied a lot, from code I have never used and
never expect to use, or which didn't in fact work (but the bit I copied did).

I think Paul Fernhout and I would both be delighted with a version of
Smalltalk in which there was a small "core" image, with segments automatically
loaded on first use, the division into segments being visible or invisible
in the browser as one chose.

I'd like to have a better understanding of
 - who is harmed by the present image size?  (what _kinds_ of users)
 - how many people are harmed by the present image size?
 - how badly are they harmed?
 - in what ways are they harmed?
 - are there any proposed solutions that would, over-all, do less harm?

For reference purposes, I just did "ps -l -y -u $LOGNAME" on my
Sparc/Solaris 2.8 box, and found

	SZ	RSS	program
	16MB	12MB	Xsun
	17MB	13MB	Acrobat reader, displaying a 16-page file
	24MB	10MB	Squeak 2.7

SZ is the total virtual memory size including kernel resources, I believe.
RSS is the resident memory size, the amount of physical memory actually in use.

It seems fair to say that if you are happy to use Acrobat reader, the size of
Squeak 2.7 should not worry you either.  Squeak 3.0 added about another 3.2 MB
to the image size.  It's fair to say that it would STILL be less than Acrobat
reader.  (Which invites the obvious question:  "what the heck is Acrobat doing
with all that memory?")  Squeak 3.0 on a PowerMac wants 20MB, but I would
expect the average sessions to need only about 12MB in its resident working
set, if that.  ("About This Computer" says that Squeak 3.0 is _using_ 19.6MB;
but that's SZ, not RSS.)

While I affirm that Squeak's size is not out of line, compared with other
programs and language implementation, there are many other reasons to want
modularity.  For me at least, Squeak falls over as often as Windows, and
modularity should help with that.