Well I should not speak for Eliot r.e. Cog, but he has been releasing reliable, field-tested Cog VMs for some time now, so planning to have updated VMs for end of January seems perfectly reasonable to me.

That's good news. There is also work to do for the actual releasing, which the VM Release Manager person would have to do (e.g., zip and post to squeakvm.org, etc.), so I wanted to see whether that was doable for them too. When Eliot provides a new (or, recommends an old) version of the Cog VM to release with 4.2, we can perform final tests using that VM for the three platforms. This will be nice for 4.2 (and, for Pharo community too) to be able to announce, "compatible with a new Cog VM downloadable over here", and have a new stable baseline out there. - Chris On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 3:02 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis@mail.msen.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 02:14:56PM -0600, Chris Muller wrote:

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Excellent, thanks Eliot.  That's been the plan for 4.2 all along, I see no reason to abandon that now.

I am currently trying to get a 4.2 RC1 built and saved under some interpreter VM.  I will need access or assistance for uploading it to ftp.squeak.org (preferably access, since I'd like to build the image myself).

Then, I would like to have just under 4 more weeks, until 11:59pm, 1/30/2011, for "last call" for 4.2.  We've been testing for some time now, we seem to have a stable, worthy release.  Throughout January, we will need to test (and fix) on all platforms, document, improve aesthetics, and update web-sites.

We will push the final release out the week of 1/31.

VM Release Manager:  Does this time-frame seem doable for a final release of the simple-stack VM?

 - Chris

Well I should not speak for Eliot r.e. Cog, but he has been releasing reliable, field-tested Cog VMs for some time now, so planning to have updated VMs for end of January seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Dave

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On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:

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On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 11:38 PM, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:

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Quoting Chris Muller <asqueaker@gmail.com>:

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Levente wrote:

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I think we should wait for the new VMs, before releasing the new images.

Hi Levente,

I did agree, but now that Eliot is on a tear with a new code generator, the first official release might still be some weeks away. Someone please correct me if that is a misstatement.

It seems unlikely 4.2 will be incompatible with whatever ends up being the first official Cog release. ??We should consider pushing it out the door so we can re-open the trunk to new featurey.

That's right, Cog's recent improvements introduced some instability. So I think we should release Squeak 4.2 with SqueakVM only and postpone the multi-VM release. We can also make the release cycle of Squeak 4.3 shorter to catch up with the two release per year policy and deliver the VM improvements earlier. I'm also sure that a lot of improvements will be done till April/May on both image and VM side.

It would be my preference to release with the Cog VM using the naive SimpleStackBasedCogit code generator. ??After all that's worth at least 3x over the standard VM whereas the unstable StackToregisterMappingCogit is only ~ 8% faster than SimpleStackBasedCogit. ??It's quite easy for me to generate either; the two coexist in the same VMMaker. best Eliot

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Levente

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??- Chris