On Jan 19, 2010, at 3:52 05PM, laurent laffont wrote:
Some thoughts:
In the Linux world it's better to have the source code first, and compiled version for convenience.
For squeak-3.11 there's the source code and it's easy to build following instructions included in the README. It's clean.
For exupery-vm several people have already asked for source code on this list to create packages for their favorite distrib. Furthermore the binary is named squeak, not pharo-vm or whatever.... not really cool. Lot of garbage in the archive. Exupery vm for windows is cleaner (but contains one file called Squeak.exe ;) ).
Why on Mac it's squeak 4.2.2 b1, on windows/linux squeak 3.11 ? I suppose there's an influence on unit tests / performance / ....
John's Mac VM's major version number were bumped to 4 when closures where added, partly because it breaks some backwards-compatability.
See recent vmdev discussion about issues running 2.5-based Scratch images for some more details
According to the mentioned discussion, the unix major version might have been increased too, had the author picked up on it.
Finally I don't know why there's an "alternative" download ... I think the alternative stuff should be on the wiki, not on the basic download page.
Historical reasons.
The Exupery VM provided unix/windows builds with closure bytecodes in october 2008, while the official VM's lagged behind.
The windows version was updated not too far behind, but a unix release for closures wasn't made until august 09.
At the time, the exupery VM also included some other fixes not found in the official releases, I can't say I know the status of those at this moment though.