I thought it would be useful for you to know some of our near- and far-term plans.
Beginning around June 4, we're going to hunker down and focus on some of our internal work. For probably a month, then, you can expect fewer updates and fewer messages from us. I haven't really figured this one out, though. We might keep putting out updates, but batched up in large groups. I just have to figure a scheme that doesn't take up a lot of our time.
Until that time, though, we will continue to clean up and publish updates for the 2.0 release. Here is a rough outline of where this activity will center over the next week:
Improve the convenience and effectiveness of removing parts of Squeak. Hopefully this will culminate in a simple 'majorShrink' that will produce an up-to-date image for WinCE and palm-top machines Our goal of the past has been full development in a 1MB image, and a usble subset that runs (with VM and free sapce) in a 1MB partition.
Rework the mouseOver logic in Morphic to reduce overhead, and eliminate quirks like multiple active scrollbars.
Release a couple of goodies that didn't make it into the release Morphic support for translucency (Michael Stevens), and Show-invisible-characters mode (Reinier van Loon)
Make it easier to import fonts, images, and active morphs from remote archives via the fileList.
- Dan
At 10:52 AM 5/27/98 -0700, you wrote:
I thought it would be useful for you to know some of our near- and
far-term plans.
Beginning around June 4, we're going to hunker down and focus on some of
our internal work. For probably a month, then, you can expect fewer updates and fewer messages from us. I haven't really figured this one out, though. We might keep putting out updates, but batched up in large groups. I just have to figure a scheme that doesn't take up a lot of our time.
Any chance those internal enhancements include the ability to make the kernel reentrant and embedable?
Thanks.
--blake
-- Download source code to my Dynace Object Oriented Extension to C and Windows Development System from: http://www.edge.net/algorithms Blake McBride (blake@edge.net) Algorithms Corporation - 615-791-1636 - USA
Blake -
Any chance those internal enhancements include the ability to make the kernel reentrant and embedable?
Yes and no.
Translation:
We are planning enhancements for the VM in the course of the summer. It's our hope to work with Andreas to clean up a bunch of things, and possibly fold in functionality similar to the Squeak API work, and maybe go to a plug-in architecture. Both of these will depend on finding some approach that doesn't seriously compromise simplicity, kernel size, or portability.
While we're at it, a pass at reentrancy would not seem inappropriate.
Along the lines of embedding, we are interested in ROMable and derivative (incremental) images. The ROOTS table in Squeak's object memory makes derivative images particularly simple, and one can certainly take an easy first step toward a ROM image by running the SystemTracer and telling it to put out all the CompiledMethods (read-only), MethodDictionaries and Classes (almost always read-only) at the beginning of the image.
So that is a sort of yes...
However, while these are all fascinating pursuits, none of these are as high priority right now for the Squeak team as making the top layer of Squeak utterly simple and powerfully general. I think we have a good record of moving the VM gradually forward, but I can't really say that we will have done anything toward embedding by the end of the summer.
....and that is a sort of no.
I can tell you one thing about the engine room: We will give every attention to support for the Jitter project, and we will immediately integrate and distribute anything that Ian produces in the area of higher performance.
- Dan
Dan --
I have implemented native windows, with events and such. Now the hard part. How do I hook Squeak into those windows.
As I understand it, Squeak writes everything to an offscreen PixMap the CopyBits them to the screen. How would you suggest intercepting these calls and redirecting them to other PixMaps or Windows? This stuff is buried deep in the bowels, and I am having a little trouble getting a handle on it.
Thanks,
jim
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