Slate and Agora; building the Slate VM

[Shaping]

Greetings:

I seek a comparison of the relative merits of Slate and Agora.  Have any of you 
used Agora?  I don't think it has been developed actively since 1997-98.

Several years ago I developed a passion for Agora, but was not able to make use 
of it at the time.  Recently I've begun studying it again.  There are three 
versions available, Agora94 on VW Smalltalk, Agora96, a C++ app, and Agora98 in 
Java.  I'm experimenting with each of these now.

Having developed almost exclusively in Smalltalk (VW mostly) for the last 
decade, I lean toward Agora94.  I want something I can carry forward easily with 
browsing tools I know, but I'm willing to consider new directions.  About when 
will there be a basic GUI framework for Slate?

I'm concerned mostly about performance and expression.  Footprint matters least 
to me.  I do a lot of math-modeling and 3D graphics.  I have a large, novel, 
OpenGL framework I spent 2.5 years developing in VW, and performance-tuning for 
both run-time speed and develop-time speed (clarity), but not size (it's 
bloated!), and it's giving me a headache as I try to refactor it for 
space-efficiency, while maintaining the same high level of expression/clarity 
I'm used to.  I have a minimal, consistent, natural-language grammar I've 
evolved and used with moderate success in Smalltalk for many years.  I want to 
implement that grammar more completely, and I think that Agora/Slate will let me 
do so.

Regarding both languages, I'm concerned about browser support for organizing, 
finding, and viewing prototypes, their evolution, and the mixins themselves.  I 
don't have enough experience with either to fully appreciate what is required, 
but I'm fairly
certain that working with large nested blocks of Agora code will become awkward, 
eventually unproductive, and likely cause a disconnection and return to 
Smalltalk.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions?

...

Right now I'm trying to build the vm with VC++ 6.0. I've seen problems with this 
approach in the archives, but I thought I'd try, anyway.  I'm getting "long 
followed by long" errors, for starters.  Is there any easy way to take all of 
the needed .c and .h files from the provided directory tree, copy them to the 
top-level Slate 0.3 directory, create a project (.dsp) for all of these, tweak 
the compiler options, use __int64 for "long long", and get this to compile?  Has 
someone already worked this out cleanly on Windows XP with VC++?  I'm very 
Windows-centric (not by choice), and haven't used Linux for development yet, 
unfortunately.

Or should I install Cygwin 1.5.12-1 (the latest)?  This was suggested in the 
installation notes, and GCC seems to produce a faster .exe.  Is this 
consistently true?


Regards,

Shaping