Hi,
I just wondered of how stable the current image format is supposed to be. When for example I would write now a project for say squeak5.2 and then that project gets abandoned for some reason but still runs in production, would a squeak VM in 10 years still be able to open it?
As far as I know these changed over the years because of:
1. Switches from architecture 16 bit -> 32 bit -> 64 bit
2. Switches in VM technology: Cog, Spur, Siesta(?), etc.
Is it even naive to believe to be able to open an old image file in the newest VM?
Thanks for your time, Philip
It's a good question, and you are right that we are seeing a lot of change.
Right now, I can run a Squeak 1.13 image from 1996 in a 64-bit VM on my 64-bit Linux laptop and it works quite well. I can also run an amazing range of old and new images on the SqueakJS VM (see try.squeak.org). On my same machine, I can also run newer images on high performance VMs with seemingly unlimited image sizes.
Time will tell if it will be practical to run your 2019 image 20 years from now, but I see no reason to expect that it will not be possible. And hopefully those older images from 1996 will still be working too.
It really comes down to whether there will be interested and motivated people who, 20 years from now, will be happily working to make it happen. To me, it is an interesting problem, and it gets more interesting as time goes on.
Dave
On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 11:43:39PM +0200, Philip Bernhart wrote:
Hi,
I just wondered of how stable the current image format is supposed to be. When for example I would write now a project for say squeak5.2 and then that project gets abandoned for some reason but still runs in production, would a squeak VM in 10 years still be able to open it?
As far as I know these changed over the years because of:
Switches from architecture 16 bit -> 32 bit -> 64 bit
Switches in VM technology: Cog, Spur, Siesta(?), etc.
Is it even naive to believe to be able to open an old image file in the newest VM?
Thanks for your time, Philip
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