PhiHo,

>     Aren't all Squeak projects stored in gzipped format ? I
> notice quite a bit of time spent while loading a locally
> stored project. Maybe the time is mostly devoted to
> uncompressing [...]

And maybe not. Don't guess. If you have evidence that this might be the
case, then tell us. Otherwise go find it ;-0

>     If SqM needs Zlib and the trend in Squeak (?) will be
> moving towards projects format, is it worth thinking about
> using Zlib as a zip plugin for Squeak ?

"Is it worth thinking"?! Yeah, it's always "worth thinking" ;-) But consider
what you are talking about: You're discussing replacing a tiny bit of code
(2% of a full VM) with a not much larger bit of code - which will require
you to rewrite significant and complicated pieces to handle the change. So
why bother?! If you need ZLib in the MobVM then just use it. Heck, who cares
about these 50k?! ;-)

> and how hard would it be to make the switch transparent
> to clients of the current ZipPlugin ?

Hard. Generally, very hard. For one thing, the interfaces will not match at
all - believe me I've looked at various (more or less free) implementations
of LZ compressors. When I was finished looking at them, I wrote the Squeak
one - directly from the specs (which turned out to be a lot simpler). Also,
you will be giving up *significant* control here - Bob and I went over some
of this stuff (which you would then do in C) to better handle a specific
case of broken input. First of all, having that code in C would've meant you
just crash. Secondly, try to find the problem. Oh yeah, and of course once
you found it you'll need to redistribute another 50k of code (compared to
the <1k of ST code that fixed this problem). I guess my preference is clear
;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas