[Vm-dev] code chart of time inside the VM

[Ben Coman]

I was planning to have a go at the issue I logged to make the VM time
monotonic...
https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/issues/36

I think its within my capability, but I wanted to get an understanding
of how time was currently handled cross-platform - so I started
developing a chart of how the code maps between different platforms
and within a platform e.g. sqUnixITimerHeartbeat  versus
sqUnixITimerTickerHeartbeat.

You can see what I was aiming for here...
http://files.openinworld.com/opensmalltalk-vm/VM-Time/

The chart is a bit expansive and may be awkward to view in a browser.
I used yEd to develop it and that provides a nice interface to
navigate it.
https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

However one problem is the chart is hard to maintain.  I developed it
mostly in one sitting and later when I came back to revise it, I found
it hard to track where I was up to.   The manual process was also a
bit error  prone.  So my plan now is to use libclang via FFI to parse
the platform sources together with Roassal to automate producing
charts from the code.

cheers -ben