[squeak-dev] SQUEAK_SPY and -spy option

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Mon Aug 31 19:16:13 UTC 2020


It looks like dead code to me. It sets a variable that is no longer
referenced. My guess would be that it sets a flag that Ian used in early
development of the Unix Squeak VM, possibly it was related to the jitter
VMs that he was doing in early days.

You can see the option being set in the sqUnixMain.c module back in 2003:
http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixMain.c?revision=620&view=markup

Earlier version control for the VM was kept on SourceForge, I don't know
if that is still available for historical purposes.

In any case, as far as I can tell it is just an option setting that once
meant something, but that has not been used for a long time.

Dave


On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:09:28AM +0200, stes at PANDORA.BE wrote:
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> I've already asked this question on vm-dev, with no replies so far.
> 
> Perhaps someone knows here on this list ...
> 
> I wonder whether anyone is using the SQUEAK_SPY environment variable,
> or knows what this is doing.
> 
> In the VM source code :
> 
> platforms/unix/vm-display-X11/sqUnixX11.c:int withSpy=          0;
> platforms/unix/vm-display-X11/sqUnixX11.c:  if (getenv("SQUEAK_SPY"))           withSpy= 1;
> platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixMain.c:       int    withSpy=           0;
> platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixMain.c:  else if (!strcmp(argv[0], VMOPTION("spy")))       { withSpy = 1; return 1; }
> 
> Also I wonder why both .c files (sqUnixX11.c and sqUnixMain.c) both define
> the same global variable (they both define withSpy).
> 
> Maybe the VM -spy option is somehow related to spyOn: and MessageTally ??
> 
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/4210
> 
> It's just a guess.
> I don't immediately see any documentation on this on wiki.squeak.org.
> 
> Perhaps -spy is related to Squeak Performance Tuning ?
> 
> Is anyone using -spy or SQUEAK_SPY ?
> 
> David Stes
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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