Hi folks,

I want to know the status of VM in squeak.
I have read the squeakvm.org pages and even the info it is detailed, it
is not clear enough for me.

I know that there are two types of vm builds (mainly) for i386 (32bits)
and x86_64 (64 bits) and that each of these vm can, when configured
before exporting C source code from VMMaker, interpret 32 or 64 bit
images.
Also, from the documentation, the 64 bit images are mostly of academic
interest. The 32 bit images are the main kind of images, the ones we
(almost) all use. And this 32 bit images can be interpreted with 32 or
64 bits built squeakvms.

On the other site, are the addons that different brilliant people are
contribuiting to the vm source code in order to have more capabilities
in the image. This functionality includes:

closures
jit

Now, I have an amd64 Debian GNU/Linux Lenny install and it is all 64 bit
(x86_64) and Jose Luis Redrejo has made an excellent work on building a
64bit squeakvm capable of interpret 32 bit images like the squeak and
pharo ones.

But this squeak vm hasn't support for closures (my main need) so, I
can't run pharo and the new squeak from Andreas on my amd64 machine in a
native way. I run this images on a 32 bit KVM virtual machine and so far
I am really impressed but I would like to have a native 64 bit squeakvm
with closure support.

The questions are:

¿Who are building squeak vm for the different architechtures?

I can see that the different squeak vm are hosted on different places
(smalltalk consulting, squeakvm.org, etc) and with different names
nomenclatures. This is sometimes confusing, mainly for new users (and
for old users too). ¿Can all the vm be hosted on a single place and with
a single name format?

¿What means the version 3.10 for vm? I barely understand that it is
related to the image that generated, but, if a squeak vm is to be used
for squeak and pharo, for example, shouldn't have a more neutral version
number?

¿What about the new vm implementations, like cog, exupery, stackvm, etc?
¿Are the sharing the same source code on squeakvm.org or are independent
and incompatible implementations?

¿Are plans to build and make available 64 bit versions of the vm for the
new users with recent equipment (almost all end user PC and laptops sold
are 64 bit)?

Finally I don't have to pressure anyone, because I understand that this
is done on a free time basis, but I think that this will greatly reduce
the barrier to squeak/pharo and smalltalk in general.

Thanks for all the excelent work done.

Miguel Cobá