[Vm-dev] VM support for older image formats

[Juan Vuletich]

On 11/05/2016 11:59 p.m., Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
> Phil, Juan, and other Cuis users,
>
>      please accept my apology.  I have meant to help you port Cuis to Spur for many months now and I always forget through pressure of work.  I can imagine if must be frustrating but please keep nagging me.  My immediate task in a 64-bit port of the Newspeak system at Cadence.  Perhaps once that's done I'll have time to attend to the Cuis Spur bootstrap.  Again I do apologize.
>
> _,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)
>

I think I can speak not only for the Cuis community, but also for 
Squeak's and Pharo's. We are all grateful for the work you have been 
doing for all of us for many years. I also want to thank Cadence and 
Qwaq / 3DICC for supporting your work.

We Cuis users want to run on Spur as much as you want us to be able to 
do so. With your help and support, I'm sure we'll do it rather soon.

Thanks,
Juan Vuletich

>> On May 11, 2016, at 7:44 PM, Phil (list)<pbpublist at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>
>> Dave,
>>
>>> On Wed, 2016-05-11 at 19:50 -0400, David T. Lewis wrote:
>>> Even the very earliest Squeak images can be run on SqueakJS:
>>>
>>>    http://try.squeak.org/
>>>
>>> The traditional interpreter VM works well for images going back to
>>> about Squeak 3.2, and up to but not including Spur images. Official
>>> (but now outdated) releases are on squeakvm.org, and on Linux (not so
>>> sure of other platforms), it is straightforward to compile an up to
>>> date version yourself (*):
>>>
>>>    http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6354
>> Your efforts to keep the ability to build the older VMs alive is
>> greatly appreciated!  I've actually fired up some early 2.x and 3.x
>> images within the last month as they still have both historical and
>> reference value.
>>
>>> The Cog VMs run recent V3 images, as long as they are closure
>>> enabled.
>>> That goes back a number of years now.
>> Yep, and that's why we (Cuis) are still on Stack and Cog V3 VMs.  We
>> will be until the changes necessary to forward migrate to Spur are
>> worked out.  We'll get there eventually, but as none of us have heavy
>> VM expertise so it takes a while.
>>
>>> Dave
>>>
>>> (*) If you try this, I would appreciate feedback as to whether you
>>> encounter any problems. I think that it is a 10 minute recipe for a
>>> first time VM builder, but I have never had any feedback to confirm
>>> or deny that claim. If it works or does not work for you, please
>>> speak up :-)
>> I can confirm that your docs worked perfectly for a 32-bit build on
>> Debian 8.  (~10 minutes if you include waiting time for downloading and
>> building inside of a VM...<60 seconds of my time :-)
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Phil