[ann] v4 project list

Peter Crowther Peter at ozzard.org
Mon Feb 21 19:20:41 UTC 2005


> From: [...] Cees de Groot
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:24:31 -0800, Tim Rowledge 
> <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu>  
> wrote:
> 
> > Please don't forget that for a long time now 4.0 has been 
> assumed to be
> > the point at which we break image backwards compatability 
> and move to a
> > new object format (at least for compiled methods) and clean 
> up a lot of
> > old back-support VM code.
> >
[...]
> I think 4.x  
> would then be reasonably short-lived, and 5.0 would introduce the VM  
> changes, object format changes, etcetera
[...]
> What is more interesting: what do you think of the proposed roadmap?

I know I'm not Tim, but I'm also involved in VM hacking over here in the
corner.  I think the proposed roadmap misses out on a big opportunity.

I've been waiting for over five years for Squeak to get the new object
format, so that it is possible to do what I want to do (which involves
significant VM changes) much more easily.  Tim's New Compiled Methods,
on which my work is based, were a mod to 2.2.  First 3.0 was going to
have the changes... Then 4.0... Now the suggestion is 5.0, or 6.0, or
X.0 where X is an unspecified time away.  I'm not interested in Morphic.
I'm not even interested in a UI, other than for development tools for a
multi-user server.  I'm interested in VM security and multi-user access
where the users are not necessarily friendly.  As a result, my
development work is on a very, very old 2.2 image and VM - a shame, as
there have been major VM improvements since that time and I'm stuck in a
time warp.

Five years of "jam tomorrow".  And now it's being pushed back again by
at least one member of the faction who have asserted that they are
leading Squeak development.  There's nothing in the roadmap, and it
feels like the folks who want to do interface-level work are fighting
shy of the fundamental VM changes.

As you've probably gathered, I don't think much of the roadmap.
Equally, I am *not* a typical Squeak user.  I am not contributing to
current development because I can't sensibly do so - the bits that I'm
doing are exactly the bits that are not being incorporated.  So it may
be that the sensible thing for the Squeak community is to push forward
with the changes that are desired by the largest part of the community,
and to ignore those on the periphery.

		- Peter



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