Coming changes ....

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Coming changes ....

James Ladd
I have been working on cleaning up some of the internals of Redline Smalltalk.
Most notedly the class loading and class path.

When these changes are finished and merged with the main/master then Redline Smalltalk
will use the same classpath specified for Java. This subtle change has great benefits.
  1. We only have one class path, not two.
  2. When you specify a JAR with your project sources you can specify it once on the classpath
    and it will be used for both Java .class files and .st source files.
  3. By using the JVM options we can now turn on and off various features without having to
    double up on the command line. For example,
    using the java -verbose flag we will be able to say: -verbose:stprep to show preprocessor
    output, at the same time we can say -verbose:class to get the JVM to show which classes
    are loaded and where from, which NOW includes Smalltalk classes as well.
  4. Inside an IDE you can tag Smalltalk as source and the IDE does the right thing and includes
    the source in the classpath and copies the Smalltalk source to the correct output folders.
    This allows makes inside IDE development with Smalltalk easier.

These changes are not in the main/master yet but they are coming soon.

Some of you may ask, "Why are you doing this rather than completing the runtime?"

There are a couple of reasons for this:

  1. There are contributors currently working on the runtime, and I'm not needed in most cases to implement the runtime.
  2. There are things that need some attention in the core, which is currently almost entirely my domain.
  3. The work done on the runtime will not be lost by the work I am doing on the core, but it will benefit from this
    as the classpath changes make everything much easier to deal with.

I hope you are keen to see the changes and continue to work with Redline. I'm excited by the neatness and effectiveness of
the changes.

- James.