[squeak-dev] Backward image and VM compatibility

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Jan 5 03:04:27 UTC 2017


On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 06:53:42PM -0500, David T. Lewis wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 06:17:55PM -0500, Bob Arning wrote:
> > 
> > On 12/21/16 5:56 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 05:15:29PM -0500, Bob Arning wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On 12/21/16 11:38 AM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > Following up on this, the backward compatibility for interpreter VM supporting
> > > > > old images was broken in VMMaker-dtl.387 of 8 November 2016, due to my attempt
> > > > > to align the primitive table closer to Cog/Spur:
> > >
> > > > Is there a specific oldest image which current VMs are expected to run?
> > > >
> > > A current interpreter VM should run a Squeak 3.2 image, although with some
> > > problems. It should be able to run images from the Squeak 3.6 and 3.8 era
> > > without problems. And it should run anything else up to but not including 
> > > Spur.
> > >
> > Is the current interpreter VM (for the mac) one of the ones on 
> > http://www.squeakvm.org/mac/? I'm not clear how to parse the names of 
> > things into what they can or cannot do.
> > 
> 
> I am referring specifically to an interpreter VM that you might build from the
> latest updated sources according to this recipe:
> 
>   http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6354
> 
> That is not very helpful if you are on a Mac, sorry for that. I think that
> it may work on Mac if you have the X11 support installed, but I am not in
> a position to verify it.
> 
> The squeakvm.org site is getting out of date, although Ian Piumarta said
> in private email that he would welcome constructive input to bring it up
> to date, and possibly to update the interpreter VM builds if there is some
> general interest in doing so.
> 

Since my reply above from last month, the interpreter VM has been updated based
on logic borrowed from the SqueakJS VM, and it can now run images back to
Squeak 1.13 and up to Squeak 4.6. The caveats are that you have to compile
it yourself (see above) and it has only been tested on Linux.

"PluckedSound backFugue play" now works nicely in Squeak 1.13 on Ubuntu, so
that is an encouraging sign. It might work on OS X with X11 installed, but I
have not tried.

The interpreter VM cannot run the newer Spur images, although SqueakJS is
able to do so. I do not anticipate that the interpreter VM will support
Spur images, since the Cog/Spur VMs already do this very well.

Dave



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