On 18-07-2013, at 1:25 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm curious about what version of Squeak was used to implement Scratch. It might be nice to attempt to transplant it from one image to a similar one... I usually learn a lot about what outside of an application has changed in its host image that way. 
> 
Round about 2.8. Lots of stuff hacked out, some odd stuff put in, a load of i18n & translation (including handling RTL languages) that needs reworking to current unicode classes, then Scratch on top of all that. I've made modest changes to the Scratch execution machinery (it's a sort of vm within squeak) that have provided considerable speedups. We have added the fast blt stuff, which has modestly sped up some parts (makes the normal morphic dev image tolerable, for example) and I'm currently working on moving it all to the current image so it can run on Stack/Cog VMs. 

There are several other projects doing similar port-forward work- Phratch for Pharo is probably the most complete. An earlier one was called 'Scat' which was a very unfortunate name. BYOB etc are *extensions* to Scratch and I'm not interested in any of that *yet*. The mission is to make a Scratch that runs on StackVM/Cog that nobody would notice anything different except the speed.

The i18n stuff is my biggest issue right now. Anyone that remembers the old days of UTF8 & UTF32 and also understands the current world of the Multilingual category classes and who can spare some time to educate me would be very welcomed.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Act naturally