[squeak-dev] Which VM for OSX

There seem to be more than 1 VM available for OSX/intel. Do they have
different features? Which one should I use? I would like one that is stable,
fast, and osx-feature-rich ... strictly in that order :-)

Thanks!

On 10.12.2008, at 21:40, Sophie (itsme213) wrote:

> There seem to be more than 1 VM available for OSX/intel. Do they have
> different features? Which one should I use? I would like one that is  
> stable,
> fast, and osx-feature-rich ... strictly in that order :-)


Use the Gold edition then.

- Bert -

"Bert Freudenberg" <[hidden email]> wrote

>> I would like one that is stable,
>> fast, and osx-feature-rich ... strictly in that order :-)
>
>
> Use the Gold edition then.

Got a URL :-) ?

I'm asking because the squeak.org VMs seem different from the Mac/VM work
John McIntosh is doing, which seems to be Beta; and then there seem to be
more OSX VMs pointed at by http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/  I think many
Squeak-folks use OSX, so I'm hopeful I can avoid blind trial-and-error

On 11.12.2008, at 00:38, Sophie (itsme213) wrote:


John's VMs are always named beta, even the stable ones:

http://ftp.squeak.org/current_stable/mac/

And they are distinguished by their golden icon, Ian's VM has a blue  
icon.

- Bert -

John's latest OS X VM's are always at:
ftp://ftp.smalltalkconsulting.com/

Latest mainline Squeak one is Squeak 3.8.19beta2U.app.zip

There are other ones for various purposes in his Experimental folder.

3.8.x Release Notes.rtf tells all about the changes.

Ken G. Brown

Ok, well first thanks to the people who responded, but allow me to  
detail the differences via the view from 10,000 meters.
BTW the detailed document is at http://isqueak.org/PlatformVMAPI

(a) The blue icon one is built by Ian which is the X11 or Quartz/Obj-C  
based one using the unix code base.

Unicode support has been slow in coming, but I believe the current  
version has worked out all the bugs? Since I
don't depend on unicode for keyboard entry I'll let others comment.

It also is quite happy to run headless.  Lastly because of the way the  
interpreter versus the UI runs you cannot use FFI
to talk to Quicktime, it will crash.  Which means you couldn't use it  
to run Sophie on the macintosh for example.
But if you don't use FFI to talk to operating system UI elements then  
this is not a problem.

(b) The gold icon one is built by me and is based on the original code  
from apple (well if any is actually left).

It has a higher build frequency since Apple tends to mess with small  
details (and large) thruout their 1000
odd operating systems revisions over the last 8 years.   It is I think  
quite unicode aware, and lately become
more happy to run headless.

Most likely it will be replaced by a 32/64bit obj-c VM based on the  
iPhone port when OS-X 10.6 ships.

(c) The gold icon one for the iPhone is an completely new (99%) Obj-C  
host API code base, with a few lines of code
from the unix port (date/time), and with the reuse of the Unix BSD  
socket stuff, why replace that...

Which is better? Well you should benchmark both bytecode/send rates  
and drawing to understand which
is better. I *think* the bytecode/send rates should be the same, but  
someone should check. As for the
drawing the execution paths are quite different, you'd again need to  
check.

As for stability I think both are the same?

I do note if anyone has a crash report they should email me so I can  
determine what code is at fault.

On 10-Dec-08, at 12:40 PM, Sophie (itsme213) wrote:

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John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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"John M McIntosh" <[hidden email]> wrote

> ...

Thanks for the explanation. Do any of these have (perhaps via some add-on
package) the ability to talk to OSX apps e.g. like Applescript?

There are 3 or 4 Objective-C plugins now,  you'll need to hunt on  
squeaksource and the mailing list for those.
There is an AppleScript plugin  TestOSAPlugin.bundle which is bundled  
with the carbon gold vm, you'll need the smalltalk code at
http://www.squeaksource.com/Applescript.html and then figure out which  
image you can load it into.

On 11-Dec-08, at 10:29 PM, Sophie (itsme213) wrote:

--
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John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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