Running Mac Squeak on Darwin?

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Thu May 22 15:51:22 UTC 2003


On Thu, 22 May 2003, Stephen Pair wrote:

> Is it possible to replicate a Mac Squeak environment without spending
> any money on Mac hardware or software?  That's my goal...I've got lots
> of old PC hardware lying around and don't want to spend any dollars on
> Mac hardware, but, I would like to have a Mac Squeak environment for
> testing purposes.  Specifically, could I install Darwin on Intel
> hardware and run the Squeak Mac VM?  Would this environment allow me to
> see behavior that is peculiar to the Mac VM for the purposes of testing?

Short answer: no.

Long Answer: You can definately run Squeak on Darwin, but you'd be running
the X11 Unix version of Squeak, simply compiled for Darwin.  The VM would
be no different from the one you'd run on Linux or a BSD on the same
machine.  The Squeak Mac VM depends on Carbon for graphics as some other
facilities, and there is no Carbon or Quartz implementation for Darwin
other than Apple's, which is PPC only.  One could convievably create a new
Darwin VM that used the Mac-specific stuff that was also available in
Darwin, but I imagine there isn't much of that.

I know John pulls some tricks to improve speed with the Mac VM.  Does he
use GCC when compiling for OS X, or is he still using CodeWarrior or MPW?
If he isn't using GCC, it may not be very doable without taking out all
of these tricks. :)

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "A weed is just a plant whose virtures have not
                     yet been discovered."            :: r. w. emerson



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