[Vm-dev] Compact class question

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Wed, 8 Dec 2010 18:46:20 +0100,
stephane ducasse wrote:
> 
> Hi Yoshiki
> 
> >> With respect to what we are doing. We are porting MicroSqueak to
> >> Pharo. MicroSqueak could be useful for teaching. The next step(we are
> >> also working in parallel on this) is to build kernel images but
> >> different from MicroSqueak. In order to do that, we need to remove all
> >> the bad dependencies on the kernel classes and clean up the Pharo
> >> image.
> >> 
> >> What are you doing with MicroSqueak?
> > 
> >  Cool, and thank you.  In some ways, what we are doing is similar; we
> > wrote an app in Squeak but trying to understand what other parts of
> > Squeak the app is using and going from bottom up sounds like an
> > intersting idea.
> 
> Our goal is to bootstrap the system so in the process we are cleaning a lot of dependencies
> and misplaced behavior.  I did not get what was your approach.
> We tried to several onces before microsqueak came in our radar.
> 	- selecting classes and recompiling them in another environment filled with stub.
> 	- building analysis tools on top of Moose to identify dependencies

  What "we" do is to manually build an app on top of an MicroSqueak
image so that we can say everything in the image is needed for the app
(give or take).  Not very general, but useful exercise for us
nontheless.  On the course, we made Compiler work without any of these
stuff.

  Similar to your second idea but I am more interested in whether we
can bootstrap Squeak image from text-based programming language like
C, I am writing a Squeak bytecode compiler in a non-Squeak language
(as a recreational programming), which generates a binary file with
bytecode and spec of unbound literals.  (The prototype of this
compiler is in OMeta2/Squeak so it is still in Squeak, but should be
easily portable as it does not use any "Squeak-like" feature).  The
resulting binary file can be loaded to MicroSqueak.

-- Yoshiki