0.3 enters alpha phase

[Brian Rice]

I realized that vm.h was slightly corrupt and slate.image.be was not a 
correct image. Both are fixed now.

On Apr 27, 2004, at 8:34 PM, Brian Rice wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This is just a kind of sneak preview of the 0.3 release; I've uploaded 
> the bootstrap generated files for little-endian systems to:
>
> http://slate.tunes.org/downloads/alpha/
>
> There's a vm.c and vm.h which are platform-independent, and a 
> slate.image which is basically the kernel image with a REPL. We don't 
> have endianness-swapping built into the vm yet, so a different image 
> is needed for big-endian systems; use the slate.image.be.
>
> Anyway, grab all the files and put them in some local directory, and 
> issue "make vm" to build a vm named "slate", then run "./slate 
> slate.image" to execute.
>
> There's no file or socket support yet, and the image takes a while to 
> get to the REPL point because it essentially has to initialize a lot 
> of things that make it easier to generate the image in the first 
> place.
>
> If you want to generate your own image, you basically have to generate 
> a VM first and then use the state built up from that process to build 
> an image based on it. So it's:
>
> Slate> Compiler generateVM: 'vmsourcename'.
>
> (once the mobius, c, vm libraries are loaded), and then
>
> Slate> Compiler buildImage: 'imageName' &littleEndian: (True/False).
>
> The current tarball in the usual place is up-to-date to perform this. 
> Anyway, give it a good beating, and report those bugs!
>
> -Brian
>
>