Giovanni,

> > Another idea I have been pondering for a while is making the lower  
> > part of Squeak's object memory be "constant". There is a large number  
> > of objects in an image that virtually never change but are only read.  
> > This part does not have to be garbage-collected, making a full GC  
> > much cheaper. When we fork off a new system process with the VM using  
> > copy-on-write pages, this part could be shared between images,  
> > reducing the over-all memory consumption significantly.
> 
> Could this constant part be kept in a separate file, thus reducing also
> the disk occupation of our images?

  That may be tricky as others say, but by normalizing the start image
offset to zero upon saving, the resulting .image *would* be more
compressable by the LZ family of algorithm.  Whether it is true or not
is a question...

-- Yoshiki