My impression on Self

[Bay-Wei Chang]

Thanks for your comments (Sept 11) on Self.

> From my experience you cannot make a snapshot on a sun4 and run it later
> on a sun3, this was disappointing as I am addicted to Smalltalk-80. This
> may be an area for future work, although it may be quite a bit of work.

Snapshots should be independent of sun3/4 architecture.  I'm not sure why
this wasn't working for you; perhaps it had to do with the ui/snapshot bug
that you mention below.

> More problematic is that I'd like to start the graphic stuff (UI at least)
> in monochrome even if I am on a color fb. This saves a looooootttttttt of
> memory when it's a scarce ressource and when you swap over the net.

This would be definitely be a good feature.  The next generation UI should
have a flexible enough graphics hierarchy to permit this trivially.
In addition, the UI caches bitmaps to speed up future allocations, but I
think the scheme it uses now may hurt more than it helps in some situations.
I'll let you know if we add monochrome support for color fb's.

> One more bad thing is that when you've loaded the ui stuff started it, then
> back to the command mode, making a snapshot sometimes produces bad files
> which cannot be run later. I'll compile more info on it if possible.

Thanks for the hint on this bug.  I've tracked it down--it had to do with
referencing a dead pixrect pointer.  Contact me if you're interested in the
fix.

Bay