Am 20.07.2006 um 17:12 schrieb S E Horne:
> To understand the entire croquet software, I want to setup a
> development environment with all the source code and re-compile
> everything. Any recommendations for this?
My recommendation? Don't. ;-)
You're looking at a truly object-oriented system. There is no way of
rebuilding it from source, because it is not defined by source code
only. It was created by directly manipulating objects in memory, and
saving a snapshot of these objects (which we call an image). Other
people loaded that snaphot, manipulated the objects in it, and saved
it again. Coding in Croquet means to manipulate class objects - the
text is only a by-product.
> Does the CroquetSource hedgehog project contain everything,
> including any native c++ code and makefiles?
Croquet is implemented on top of Squeak. Squeak is a Smalltalk,
consisting of two parts: a virtual machine, and the image.
The virtual machine is written in Squeak Smalltalk and translated to
C. The code for this is contained in the package "VMMaker",
installable from SqueakMap. Additionally, there is hand-coded C for
interfacing the hardware and operating system. These platform-
dependend parts can be downloaded from squeakvm.org.
The Croquet image was created by taking a Squeak image and loading
various packages, and modifying the image in between. The process can
be followed by looking into the homebase image which is part of the
Croquet SDK.
The Squeak image is evolved from an older image, going back to an
Smalltalk-80 image, which goes back to even older object images.
Quoting the FAQ: "Some bits in this Squeak are descended from
Smalltalk-76. They have been loaded and saved in a 'core image' many
times. It is, theoretically possible to start from nothing (since it
has been done in the past, back before the earth cooled), but it is
not easy." (
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/769)
Welcome to the wonderful world of objects. You might even like it,
and never look back ;-)
- Bert -