[squeak-dev] trunk and new vm etiquette

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue Jul 21 19:24:46 UTC 2020


Hi Levente,

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 11:21 AM Levente Uzonyi <leves at caesar.elte.hu>
wrote:

> Hi Eliot,
>
> On Mon, 20 Jul 2020, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >     I've just found and fixed a VM bug in an as-yet-unpublished pair of
> primitives that replace FloatArrayPlugin>>primitiveAt[Put] and
> Float64ArrayPlugin>>primitiveAt[Put].  The new replacement, which allows
> two methods
> > (at:[put:]) in FloatArray to relace four methods
> (Float32Array>>at:[put:] & Float64Array>>at:[put:]) are some 5 to 10 times
> faster than the plugin methods.  The issue is when to publish the
> corrections to trunk.
> > Since the existing VM is broken I don't want to simply push to trunk and
> have people inconvenienced by a sudden emergence of failures in the
> FoatArrayTests.  However, I do want to push the corrections soon, because
> they're a
> > substantial improvement.  So the question is how long should I wait?
> >
> > Is it OK if I push the fixes to FloatArray and subclasses in a week?  Do
> people using trunk keep an eye on the CI builds and upgrade, or would they
> appreciate a heads up?  If so, as soon as the AppVeyor builds succeed
> > for CogVM source as per VMMaker.oscog-eem.2778, I'll let you know and
> ask that you upgrade your VM.
>
> I think most people don't update their VMs often. I still tend to fire
> up the one shipped with the 5.3 release. So, IMO the question is not how
> long to wait but what to do when things are about to break.
> I presume that without updating the VM, the image would not work properly.
> So, I think the best would be if the user were warned during the update
> if the VM would be incompatible with the changes.
> I'm thinking about checking the VM version in the preamble of the package
> and raising a Warning when it clearly lacks the required updates.
> Users can still continute with a Warning or terminate the update process,
> while cli tools will act as if an error had occured.
>

That's a great idea.  I should have thought of that one myself.  I'll do
exactly that.  Thanks!

Levente
>
> > _,,,^..^,,,_
> > best, Eliot
> >
> >
>


-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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