Unified Virtual Machine/Image....

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Tue Apr 17 03:32:11 UTC 2001


"Jerome Lee" <jlee0011 at san.rr.com> is widely believed to have written:

> I read somewhere that there is work being done in the area of combining the
> Squeak Image with the Virtual Machine to make a unified executable, that
> seems great, but I cant find any further information about it. Can anyone
> point me in the right direction?
Sorry Jerome, I've been meaning to get back to you on your original
question for days, but somehow it all slipped.

Generally this is a platform dependent issue. For example, on a Mac or
on Windows you can install the image as a resource that is linked to the
vm just as any other resource (icons, menus, user messages etc) and then
change the image loading code to open the resource and read from it.
IIRC Jan Bottorff did that (or something like it) for ObjectWorks many
years ago when at ParcPlace (indeed you can see how long ago simply from
the fact it was for ObjectWorks - it preceeded VisualWorks 1.0!).
On my Acorn, there is no extra work at all, since the way resources are
handled makes use of the filing system to obviate the complication.
On unix, ifyou look in the sqXWindow.x file you will find references to
USE_INTERNAL_IMAGE scattered around. Unfortunately, I am unable to make
a compile work unless that #define is commented out, but you may have
better success.

I'd like to imagine that a really smart OS would make it possible to
store the image in the executable and do a copy-on-write dooberry so
that only the changes you make need saving.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: ESC: Emulate Small Child





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