Andreas Raab wrote:
Folks -
This is probably not the best time to raise this issue but I've been increasingly unhappy about VMMaker over time (ask Eliot :-) From my perspective VMMaker is now a tool that gets more in your way than it helps. I'd like to make to make it *much* simpler. Here's what I think VMMaker ought to do:
- Translate a set of classes into C code in a specific directory.
Period. No fuzzing with second-guessing of absence or presence of platform or support directories, no upfront-decisions about what plugins to build internally vs. externally, no guessing about the layout of the files in a particular port, no copying files between unrelated directories.
I agree.
But I'd like something else. Currently VMMaker is both for building the whole VM and plugins. I almost never build the whole VM. And I build small plugins all the time. I believe that the subset for building plugins should be a separate package.
I don't mind loading the whole interpreter. But, for example, Cuis does not include Balloon. So loading the Balloon plugin is not trivial, and really not needed if I'm just building, for example, a LinearAlgebra plugin.
What I do is to strip out unneeded plugins in order to build a VMMaker package that can cleanly load and run in Cuis.
Not a big deal, but something that could be addressed.
Cheers, Juan Vuletich