Hi Andreas--

 > Anyone interested?

      Of course. :)

      I tried this approach in 2003. There ended up being so much trial 
and error producing something that the VM would run that I decided to 
try the "one last shrink" approach first (with a network interface for 
adding already-compiled methods retained, since I wanted to end up with 
that in there anyway). In particular:

 > ...do the bootstrap: Instantiate the first process, its first context,
 > the first message. Run it in the simulator to set up the remaining
 > parts of the kernel image (Delay, ProcessorScheduler etc).

      I guess I found that last sentence easier said than done. :)  But 
I figured that once I'd proven what those essential components were, I 
would come back to this approach, now that I knew what I was doing. :)

      I don't even think the global lookup issue is all that hard. (I 
advocate having no system dictionary; keep each class literal in the 
name slot of the class itself, and have a means of traversing the class 
tree from a well-known starting point. Scanning through memory for the 
class and pool literals you want is straightforward.)


-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]