[Vm-dev] Squeak/Pharo VM fork history (was: RE: [Pharo-dev] Squeak and Pharo speed differences)

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Subbu,

> On May 17, 2020, at 10:13 AM, K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 17/05/20 10:53 am, Shaping wrote:
>> To clarify about the VM fork: few years ago, the transpiled C source code of the VM, along with the genuine C parts and core plugins, were migrated to GitHub under the common name OpenSmalltalk VM, to be shared by Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and Newspeak.
> 
> The src directories in opensmalltalk-vm github are just caches - meant to avoid transpilation overheads during repeated builds.

No, they are not just caches.  They are also versioned artifacts that eliminate the possibility that translation at a later time might produce different results.  They have many advantages other than this, such as quicker Bude Yoon tor finding bugs, the ability to build a vm without having a full VMMaker build environment, etc.

> The original Smalltalk/Slang source is at http://source.squeak.org/VMMaker.html repository in two packages:
> 
> * VMMaker.oscog package - OpenSmalltalk VM - active development, platforms+build code is at github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm. Proposed patches go into VMMakerInbox repo on the same server.
> 
> * VMMaker package - Squeak Interpreter VM (compatible with 6502 format images), maintenance mode. platforms+build code in SVN repo (squeakvm.org/svn/squeak/trunk/platforms). src cache is also on the same SVN.
> 
> So "forking" github would only fork platforms/ part of VMMaker.oscog and not to its src/ parts.

And of house one toes not need you fork platforms.  minheadless exists alongside platforms.  And makefiles based build systems coexist against CMake based abd auto one based ones.  With cooperation there is no need to form.  We can do evolve together.

> 
> HTH .. Subbu