Smalltalk › Pharo › Pharo Smalltalk Developers

Use of minimal image

_‹ Previous Topic Next Topic _›

Classic

List

Threaded

2 messages Options

K K Subbu

Use of minimal image

Hi,

I am tempted ;-) by the following message on Pharo's download page:
---
The minimal image is a reduced version of Pharo 7.0 (alpha): You have
the most basic environment and you can interact with it via command
line. WARNING: For hackers only!
---

What kind of hacking has been done with this image in the past ?

Can this image be used as a swiss-army knife for st (ala busybox in GNU)?

The image is small enough to ship as part of regular VM binary and
plugins. If pharo (binary) is run without any image, this image can be
used as a fallback to run st scripts. At launch time, we know underlying
platform OS and architecture, so we could move a lot of
platform-specific vm code into such st scripts.

Or, we could use it within Makefiles to build plugins outside of src tree.

Regards .. Subbu

Pavel Krivanek-3

Re: Use of minimal image

2017-05-15 12:05 GMT+02:00 K K Subbu <[hidden email]>:

Hi,

I am tempted ;-) by the following message on Pharo's download page:
---
The minimal image is a reduced version of Pharo 7.0 (alpha): You have the most basic environment and you can interact with it via command line. WARNING: For hackers only!
---

What kind of hacking has been done with this image in the past ?

Can this image be used as a swiss-army knife for st (ala busybox in GNU)?

The image is small enough to ship as part of regular VM binary and plugins. If pharo (binary) is run without any image, this image can be used as a fallback to run st scripts. At launch time, we know underlying platform OS and architecture, so we could move a lot of platform-specific vm code into such st scripts.

Or, we could use it within Makefiles to build plugins outside of src tree.

The main purpose of this image was to provide base for reloading of Pharo from packages using Metacello. Now it starts to be obsolete because it was done by top-down shrinking that is replaced by bootstrapping.

The image is quite big, it contains Opal, basic network support, Monticello and Metacello. With bootstrap we are able to generate smaller images where this "minimal" image is part of reloading steps.

This image should be able to support small custom web server.

-- Pavel

Regards .. Subbu