[Vm-dev] Question on Embedding Squeak

[Michael van der Gulik]

On 2/23/08, Brian Brown <rbb at techgame.net> wrote:
>
>
> Hello folks,
>
> Is it possible to embed squeak in a host C application with it's own
> thread (if needed)?
>
> Is so, how could I get started?  ;-)
>
>

Hi Brian.

The Squeak interpreter is essentially a while loop with a switch statement
in it for each of the 255 bytecodes. Memory is allocated on the heap but in
a platform dependent manner. There might be issues with resource contention
between Squeak and your application, but it should be perfectly possible to
integrate Squeak in another application.

The VM is automatically converted from Smalltalk to C using VMMaker. The
generated code is mostly readable.

Start at http://www.squeakvm.org/, and search http://wiki.squeak.org/ (i.e.
Google for "squeak vm build instructions site:wiki.squeak.org") for
instructions for building the VM. You can customise the platform-specific
code
for opening files, allocating memory, loading the image  etc if they
cause problems.
You'll probably also want to disable Squeak's video output, which shouldn't
be difficult.

Igor has recently done some interesting work in essentially running Squeak
as an embedded application in itself. Read his postings about the Hydra VM
on the main squeak-dev mailing list for more info.

Gulik.


-- 
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/
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