[Vm-dev] Re: VM Maker: VMMaker-dtl.189.mcz

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Wed Oct 6 16:33:59 UTC 2010


On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 09:10:46AM -0700, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
> On 06.10.2010, at 08:10, David T. Lewis wrote:
> > 
> > Yes, that is the intent. It should help with the transition to Cog in
> > several ways:
> > 
> > 1) It should now be safe to use Cog on your favorite image, even if you
> > think you might want to go back to the old image format.
> > 
> > 2) If you save an image from a Cog VM in the newer image format (6505)
> > and distribute it to folks who may not be able to run Cog for one reason
> > or another, it will now be possible for them to load that image back
> > into a traditional VM.
> > 
> > 3) If you want to use Cog to build an an image for wide distribution (the
> > upcoming Squeak 4.2 release for example) and you want to distribute the
> > image in the older image format (probably a prudent choice for the next
> > round of releases), you can now load and save the image one time in a
> > traditional VM, and the image will be put back into 6504 format.
> > 
> > Caveat: I just finished doing this last night and it is only lightly
> > tested.  I don't anticipate any problems, but you never know ;)
> > 
> > The traditional VM should still run pre-closure images (format 6502)
> > and will continue to save them in pre-closure 6502 format. Eliot
> > set this up so that the conversion from 6502 pre-closure format to
> > 6504 format happens automagically, but only when you first actually
> > compile something with closure support. But I guess this should be
> > tested to make sure I did not break it ;)
> 
> Oh. That is great news - so you are saying that the Cog VM is able to
> run old images, so it is safe to upgrade the VM anyway? E.g. I should
> be able to run Etoys as-is on Cog, even being able to save the image,
> until it is converted to closures?

That is a good question. I'm not sure about this (and I'm away from
Squeak now and cannot check). I'm assuming that Cog will always save
the image as 6505 (closures + float reordering), and that loading
it back into a standard VM would then result in a 6504 image format.
It might be possible to put that image all the way back into 6502
format, because it presumably would contain no actual closure bytecodes
at this point. I had not actually thought about it until you asked
just now.

So the short answer is no, it is probably not safe to save an Etoys
image from Cog if you will ever need to run it on an old pre-closure
VM. But we should try it and find out for sure.

Dave



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