About VM version

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Wed Nov 8 20:55:04 UTC 2006


Giuseppe Luigi Punzi wrote on Wed, 08 Nov 2006 11:26:21 +0100
> One question. Why, on http://www.squeakvm.org/, Unix has a 3.9 VM and 
> the last Windows version is 3.7?

The fact that the versions numbers for the VM are so similar to those
for the images causes a lot of confusion. In reality there is a *lot* of
both backward and forward compatibility so that it is perfectly ok for
you to use a 3.7-7 VM with a 2.1 image or else a 3.4 VM with a 3.9
image. Obviously an older VM won't have the bug fixes that were created
after it was released.

The VM is generated by running the VMMaker package inside of Squeak to
translate the parts written in Slang into C. The resulting VM is then
tagged with a name based on the version of the image which was used to
run VMMaker. So if this process happened inside a 3.7 image, the VM will
be called 3.7.2 or something like that. This means that if Ian is using
a 3.9 image in Unix while Andreas prefers to work in a 3.7 mage in
Windows their VMs will have rather different version numbers even if
they have exactly the same features and even if the Windows one is
actually newer.

Unless, of course, the naming scheme has been changed since the last
time I looked :-)

-- Jecel



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