VM & Image, chick & egg?

Brian Zhou brian_zhou at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 24 06:01:53 UTC 2001


Hi Squeakers,

I'm looking at the "Building the Windows & Unix/Linux VM" wiki page, I can
follow the steps and build the VM just fine. But I have some questions
regarding "why":

 * Looks like an image is needed if you really want to start from scratch,
for (re-)generating interp.c etc.
 * In order to use the image of course you need a VM

So, how does the first Squeak VM/image got bootstrapped? Using some other
running Smalltalk-80?

Is it true that the current image = original Smalltalk-80 image + changeSet1
+ changeSet2 + ...? What is the pros and cons of using image binary vs.
Smalltalk text source for maintaining the objects? I'm quite used to the
"cvs update; ./configure; make" dance. There must be some reason
Smalltalk/Squeak chose this way. I even remember someone on the list saying
"file system is evil", but why?

IMHO, the image binary approach pretty much determines you can only start
with a large image stripping down, instead of starting from minimum and
modularly build up. Does anyone have a stripped-down mini.image while still
can keep up with the new changes? As an example, the Squeakette aka.
SqueakEmbedded is still at 2.2 - look at the ImageFileInMemory.c and you'll
see what I mean. Other variations, ports of Squeak to handheld must face
similar problems unless you're willing to take everything in the image.
Smalltalk in general should be very change-friendly, but seems to me that
once in binary format, it's no longer delete-friendly.

I'd be glad if I'm convinced either right or wrong.

-Brian





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