2008/9/9 Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>:
Well, BitBlt code is , thanks God, platform independent. So you can easily backport changes into any VMMaker package. As for FT2Plugin , as long as it works well and maintained by its developer , i don't see any problem with it. I can build VM for win32, and (maybe) for Linux. But i can't do this for Macs, since i don't have one :) For maintaining a healthy VM , one need to setup all 3 platforms to be able to build & test VM on it. Otherwise its not makes any sense, because once we have multiple maintainers, the process starts to be complicated and will require much more time investments & coordination to ensure that some fix or improvement will be delivered fast on all platforms well tested and polished. :)
so how can we progress on this front. Bryce proposed to build a vm for linux or windows. I imagine that john could help for the mac one. Else we can also try. Mathieu recompiles his vm regularly
Well, as i said, putting FreeType into VM is simple thing. But maintaining a code base or regular basis is completely different thing. I'm not sure i have enough spare time to do this now. First, because i'm busy with Hydra VM. Second , I think you are aware, that Cog & Hydra will merge in future. Before this happens, i have little interest in supporting old-fashioned VMs :) I planning to do a major refactoring in Hydra, after which , an Interpreter/ObjectMemory can be simulated in image. But this will have a major impact on backward compatibility. But for minor changes, like in some plugins, it not hurts a lot. I think that, if you planning to maintain own VM, then i'll advice to split VMMaker package on two separate parts: - VM core - all plugins Because VM is a big code bloat , which is hard to manipulate with. Also, it would be good to have a common code repository, and separate tracker of bugs and fixes for VM/plugins, so it will make an integration easier for all interesting parties.
Stef
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