Hi,

On 8 Aug 2018, at 09:33, Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:



On 7 August 2018 at 13:47, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ben,

Sorry for coming here so late, I didn���t see this thread before. 
I already have a working minheadless branch that was adapted to Eliot���s process. 
It was working for Pharo in Linux and Mac (Windows was ongoing but not finished, that���s why is not pushed).

You can find this branch here: 


I'll have a look at it.
 
Interesting part is that I didn���t tackled any of the issues you are working on, so the work is easily mergeable :) 

Cheers, 
Esteban

Ps: with some changes in image, I���m using exclusively this VM since a couple of months and it works fine.

That is good to know.  So just to be clear... 
even though its name indicates "headless", you are running a full graphical Image?

Yes, using SDL2 and OSWindow (with some modifications). Advantages of Pharo investment on this, even in things that seemed useless at the beginning ;)
Also, the minheadless VM has a ���traditional display��� flag that will start a word too.

I got more curious about the original announcement saying... 
"minheadless is a VM variant that unifies a lot of the code for Windows, Linux and OS X.���

Yes, I like what Ronie did there, even if there is still work to do, but is cool.


I compare...
   find "platforms/Win32/vm" -exec wc {} \;
   find "platforms/Unix/vm" -exec wc {} \;
   find "platforms/Mac OS/vm" -exec wc {} \;
to...
   find "platforms/minheadless" -exec wc {} \; 

and if nothing important has been missed it seems about 30% of the original size. 
I'd expect Ronie's effort to produce this should have a massive impact on future maintainability.  

It depends, but this is one of the reasons why we want to move into it. 
Our strategy is let the less possible in the VM (ideally, just the ���core��� VM and a great FFI support), and move all the rest into the image.

Esteban


cheers -ben

P.S. I excluded the following presuming its common before/after.
   find "platforms/Cross/vm" -exec wc {} \;
btw, its about half the size of platforms/minheadless.