[Vm-dev] Removing most of the windowing code

[Ronie Salgado]

Hi,

I am fighting Window VM compilation issues (e.g. Cairo with GCC5.x under
> Mingw).
> If you have a GCC5 instead of the old 4.6, I am interested in your config.
>
Now I am building in Windows using both, MinGW version 4.9.3, and Visual
Studio 2015 Community Edition.

I got working pharo,exe -headless Pharo-minimal.image eval "1+1" (the
-headless parameter is for the image to quit after finishing).
When running a normal Pharo.image, I am getting a FFI related crash (with
Visual Studio and MinGW), when the image tries to read the APPDATA
environment variable.

Right now I am using the same main function for both, the Unix and Win32
VM. This means, that we are close of having the embedded version.

In windows I am build two variants of the VM, pharo.exe (or squeak.exe) and
pharow.exe (or squeakw.exe). The executable without the w is a console
program, so it can use stdin, stdout and stderr. The executable with the w
is a windows program that does not create a console window on startup, but
it cannot use stdout, stderr, or stdin. This is the standard workaround for
an annoying limitation of Windows itself (Python does the same in windows,
with the same nomenclature).

Visual Studio is unstable than MinGW, but it has an excellent debugger.
With Visual Studio, I am getting some false positives for an assertion
because they get miscompiled. For some reason, the
assert(GIV(remapBufferCount) == 0) gets compiled into the same as
assert(GIV(remapBufferCount)). Apart from this assertion, these two
versions of the VM are crashing in the same place.


> Fantastic, except:
>
>
> - Unified standard CMake building scripts for Unixes. I hate autoconf. I
> want to use them in Windows too.
>
>
> We have agreed that we will use makefiles and restrict make to generating
> platform config.h files that define platform facilities.  I have very good
> reasons for doing this.  I have discussed this at length this year.  Please
> don't make me argue this all over again.
> ...
> [goodness deleted]
>
I cannot just use makefile, because I am also compiling in Windows using
Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition, by generating the visual studio
projects with CMake. I looked for the older discussions on the mailing
lists, I could not find, a long discussion on the mailing list, except for
several short ones.
I have also seen some projects(LLVM, Boost) that have more than one build
system, an official based on autoconf(or something else), and an
alternative based on CMake.

As for the config.h, I can also generate it using CMake, and I will start
doing it now because I think that it is related to the FFI crashing issues
that I am experimenting on Windows. Currently I am already using CMake for
generating the git version string. As long as git is in the path and cmake
founds it, the header with the version string is generated correctly, even
when using the Visual Studio projects.

Anyway, I am not using the old CMakeVMMaker that Igor did(and I just
learned about Ian CMake work by finding in the mailing list). I just
adapted the plain CMake scripts that I normally use for building my own
projects to build the VM.

  Are you on board?  Would you like to discuss this on skype or somewhere?

Sure we can discuss it, I am on chile so we are not far apart in time zones.

As long as building the VM can be done automatically in Unixes by running a
short number of commands, that work most of the time, I am OK with it.
As for Windows, it has to be possible to use Visual Studio in addition to
MinGW or Cygwin. Visual Studio is required to be able to build for the
Universal Windows Platform, and getting the VM working in a retail XBox One
( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/index ).

Best regards,
Ronie

2016-11-26 14:09 GMT-03:00 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>:

>
> Hi Roni,
>
>
> On Nov 23, 2016, at 11:12 PM, Ronie Salgado <roniesalg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am working on removing most of windowing code from the VM, and in trying
> to unify the platform specific code of the VM. In the MinimalistHeadless
> branch of https://github.com/ronsaldo/opensmalltalk-vm I made the
> following changes:
>
>
> Fantastic, except:
>
>
> - Unified standard CMake building scripts for Unixes. I hate autoconf. I
> want to use them in Windows too.
>
>
> We have agreed that we will use makefiles and restrict make to generating
> platform config.h files that define platform facilities.  I have very good
> reasons for doing this.  I have discussed this at length this year.  Please
> don't make me argue this all over again.  Are you on board?  Would you like
> to discuss this on skype or somewhere?
> ...
> [goodness deleted]
>
> Does it make sense, to always trying to create a display in startup time?
>
>
> Good question.  The answer should be "no" but that only makes sense if the
> system is written to not depend on a display when in headless mode.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Ronie
>
>
>
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