[squeak-dev] Shrinking

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Mon Jan 6 21:34:29 UTC 2014


On 6 January 2014 20:56, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> What's the state of the art in shrinking these days?
>
> I'm starting a new web project with Squeak, and I want to create a smallish
> base image that I can use to build up images for development and deployment.
> It doesn't have to be absolutely minimal, just unloading unnecessary code
> and cleaning up the registries, clearing caches etc would fine.
>
> I tried "Smalltalk shrinkAndCleanDesktop", but it complains about obsolete
> behaviours still being present, so I guess there's some bit rot there.
>
> Suggestions?

Tobias Pape's the person to most recently attempt to shrink the image:
I'd start by seeing what he stubbed his toes against. Tobias found
that MC packages don't unload in the correct way: they do call a
class's #unload (but only because MCClassDefinitions call their
class's #removeFromSystem), but only do so after the class's methods
have all been unloaded. That means that often the machinery needed to
unload the class has already been unloaded. It looks... a bit messy to
get things to work properly, possibly involving faking
SystemChangeNotifier notifications of method removals.

frank

> Colin
>
>
>


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