[Vm-dev] Squeak/Pharo VM fork history

Jakob Reschke forums.jakob at resfarm.de
Mon May 18 08:08:35 UTC 2020


Pharo VM did not only fork the transpiled C code, they also put the
Smalltalk VMMaker code in the repository and maintain it there. They
do not use the VMMaker Monticello repository if I understand
correctly. So in their repository and workflow, it really is a source
fork.

Am Mo., 18. Mai 2020 um 09:54 Uhr schrieb K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com>:
>
>
> On 18/05/20 1:25 am, Eliot Miranda 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.
>
> Eliot,
>
> That's precisely what I meant by "transpilation overheads". I didn't
> want to expand on that because I just wanted to point out that VMMaker
> is the original source and not the github. So copying git files is not
> really a "source fork". It is a build hack. Any updates to this git
> outside of transpilation will only be local to a build and will be
> overwritten by next transpilation.
>
> Regards .. Subbu


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