[Vm-dev] How to build a standard Unix interpreter VM on Linux using a Squeak trunk image

[Jeff Gonis]

Hi David and Stephane,

I sent David an email thanking him very much for this email on the
squeak-dev list and I saw this message and I thought that maybe I could
state what value David's email had for me, as a vote for David sending it.

I had in fact gone and looked at Mariano's blog and also the Deep Into
Smalltalk vm course slides to work on building a vm, but I generally use
the latest squeak image in my development, and in this image neither Gofer
nor Metacello are present. Both of the resources that were listed
explicitly place their instructions in the context of operating inside of a
Pharo image and using Gofer, and so if you are not in a Pharo image,
instead of working on getting a vm built you first have to work on figuring
out how to get Gofer and Metacello up and running in your image. This can
discourage you and eventually cause you to turn your attention to doing
other development in the image which is what happened for me.

David's instructions worked for the first time I tried them, even being so
thorough as to tell me how to deal with the merge window that popped up,
and worked inside a Squeak image.  Unfortunately, I attempted the same
instructions from inside a pharo 1.3 image and came across several errors
with what appear to be unsatisfied dependencies and a syntax error.  So it
looks like right now we are kind of stuck with a situation in which the
instructions for building a VM differ between Pharo and Squeak.  But this
is why David's email was so valuable, because the most clear directions for
VM building for me were pharo specific, and now there are instructions
suited to Squeak that I can use. So I don't see his email as duplication
but rather as providing the directions that I was unable to get from the
other resources.

Anyway, just wanted to put in my 2 cents on why I appreciated David's work
so much.

Thanks,
Jeff G.
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