Thanks, Frank.

Maybe I wasn't that clear. I wanted to know if it would be possible to have
one vm for linux, Windows, Mac, ..., that could use an interpreter object
engine, stack object engine or a cog object engine.

Alex


2013/2/4 Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>

> On 4 February 2013 21:08, Alexander Lazarević <laza at e11bits.com> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > Just to get myself up to date on the latest. Is it still true, that we
> got
> > three independent VMs?
> >
> > 1. Interpreter VM
> > 2. Stack VM
> > 3. Cog
> >
> > So as I recall the Stack VM was planned to replace the Interpreter VM
> > entirely. Or are there any cases were one only could use an Interpreter
> VM
> > (or cog)? Or is the Stack VM the all versatile VM by now? What are the
> > requirements for cog to run?
>
> If you have a 64 bit machine and no way to install 32 bit libraries
> (Heroku, say), then Interpreter VM is your only choice. (Or, 32 bit
> libs are a requirement for Cog.)
>
> > It might not come as a surprise, but I haven't looked into the VM code
> > lately. But I recall that the linux VM at least uses the modules
> framework
> > to have different display, sound, etc. plugins for the VM. I don't know
> how
> > interleaved the VMs from above are, but would it be out of scope to have
> > _one_ VM that could have different object engines as VM plugins? So the
> VM
> > could check the architecture it's running on and the image that should be
> > loaded and decide on that what object engine to load/use?
>
> I'll leave it to others to answer definitively but I suspect the
> answer is that while you can share the codebase to a large extent, you
> can't have a cross-platform binary. Squeak does run on at least OS X,
> Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, RISC OS.
>
> frank
>
> > The obvious benefit for the enduser I see is: *There is only one VM !*
> >
> > The benefit for VM developers might be that they only need to focus on
> the
> > object engines and they would share a common VM frame.
> >
> > This might be a "well yes, but too much work" thing, but nevertheless
> it's
> > something I would like to share.
> >
> > (If turns out that the energy would better invested into something
> > different, there is also the possibility to use the package system on
> debian
> > derived systems, that would take care to install the right VMs on such
> > system, so that the enduser wouldn't need to worry about this. And I
> guess
> > there is a similar mechanism for windows and mac)
> >
> > Alex
> >
> >
> >
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20130204/1bae07ef/attachment.htm