Can’t really say but I'm hoping to get rid of ImageSegment within the next 2 years (very rough estimate).
Speed is important to me, as I use ImageSegment to create snapshots of our applications (and hence I need write support, which Bert apparently removed). Those snapshots can exceed 90 MB and the graphs include thousands of objects. I fear that a pure Smalltalk implementation would not be fast enough.
On the other hand, we would simply not move to a VM version without ImageSegment support, so that case may give me the boost I need to get rid of ImageSegment :) Currently we’re preparing to move to our first Cog VM in production. If you can give me 2 or 3 months, so that I know the version we use works for us, you could then remove ImageSegment support and we would start replacing ImageSegment with something else so we could keep updating our VM.
Cheers,
Max