About virtual machines and images...

[Brian T. Rice]

Pupeno wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm new to the concept of virtual machines and images like Slate (or any 
> Smalltalk-like environment) use it. So, I have some newbie questions about 
> it. I was wondering about the development cycle of a system like this. 
> Normally, in my other just-compiled development, I only put the sources in 
> the repository, retrieve it and compile them. Here, there's more than compile 
> it.

The step you're missing is turning these ingredients into a core for 
live execution. Slate does not work unless the parser, core collections 
and streams it depends on, the compiler, VM bindings, lexical 
environment, and the REPL are all loaded in to one whole system. All 
those libraries have to be designed with each others' interaction 
assumptions in mind - if they stop working for even the shortest amount 
of time, the whole thing stops working and crashes. We do have in mind 
some ways to make this more robust, but we have more work to do in other 
areas before this can be implemented.

> Do you often rebuild the virtual machine and/or the image to keep it up to 
> date with the repository ?

That's simple:

1) We do build new images every time there are changes to the source 
libraries that affect whether or not your image can load those source 
libraries from the head branch of CVS. That generally means any time 
libraries loaded into a bootstrap image are affected themselves.

2) Specifically, any time we make changes to the VM that require a 
slightly-different image configuration in order to load it properly (or 
vice-versa), we rebuild both the VM and image.

> Thanks.
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