[Vm-dev] Help needed - can we add VectorEnginePlugin to the plugins.ext for Windows builds?

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Aug 20 01:08:37 UTC 2021


Could someone with a working Windows build environment for opensmalltalk-vm
please check and see if VectorEngine plugin builds are now working, and if
it is therefore safe to add VectorEnginePlugin to the following configurations?

  build.win64x64/squeak.cog.spur/plugins.ext
  build.win64x64/squeak.stack.spur/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.cog.spur.lowcode/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.cog.spur/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.sista.spur/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.stack.v3/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.cog.v3/plugins.ext
  build.win32x86/squeak.stack.spur/plugins.ext

This only needs to be checked for one configuration, probably squeak.cog.spur.
If this works then the others should be good also. It is important to
check it with the "normal" build configuration (not debug configuration)
to make sure it will work for a standard opensmalltalk-vm release.

There are two specific things that need to be confirmed:

1) Does the actual VM build work, and does it produce a VectorEnginePlugin.so
   in the compiled output?

2) Does the resulting VM with VectorEnginePlugin run a Cuis image with
   VectorGraphics loaded?

These are two separate questions. If someone can answer question #1 first,
this will be very helpful and we can follow up on question #2 after.

Why does this need to be tested? I expect no issues with compilation,
but we still need to confirm. However, on Linux I found that the
optimizers in the llvm compiler will induce problems for VectorEnginePlugin,
and if we see similar issues in Windows builds, we may need to tweak
the build procedures accordingly.

TIA,
Dave



More information about the Vm-dev mailing list