[self-interest] Re: Self on Linux (was: Self 4.1)

[David Ungar]

Hi, guys!

1. Is anyone having problems with Self 4.1.1 on SPARC?
    I had one report of difficulty, which I could not reproduce.
    As far as I know, it should work fine.

2. Compilation is pretty slow on SPARC.
   It is much faster under Metrowerks, or any other environment supporting
   precompiled header files (such as Visual C++).
   On my Powerbook, the whole VM recompiles in about 3 minutes.

- Dave



At 11:32 AM +0100 11/17/99, Gordon Cichon wrote:
>Hi Thorsten,
>
>you made a lot of good points in your last posting.
>I would like to add the following:
>
>In the meantime, I got access to an ancient sparc station 10.
>(BTW, how do I find out how much memory it has?). I also tried
>to download Self 4.1 last week which did not work then.
>
>I appreciate your commitment to Self very much. Thank you for
>considering supporting its further development. Please consider
>instead of buying a small machine on which Self already runs,
>buying a powerful machine for compiling the system. When I was
>developing on Self for Linux I pretty much overcame already the
>stage where I would have needed a running system for reference.
>Thanks to Mario's book on Sparc, I was able to figure out what's
>happening inside to the appropriate extent. It bugged me much more
>that I got really long turnaround times when recompiling the Self
>VM. Whenever I changed something in a header file which occurred
>quite frequently, I got to wait for half an hour to an hour to
>recompile. It takes already nearly ten minutes to load Self's symbol
>table into the debugger. I already upgraded my memory from 64M to
>128M last January which helped a lot, nevertheless my working on Self
>was still strongly limited by compilation speed. Self has even a
>sophisticated environment for doing parallel compiles which I
>unfortunately had not the pleasure to take advantage of.
>
>IMHO, doing a Linux/i386 port of Self is particularly good coice
>because
>1) Virtually everybody can install Linux on her PC and use Self.
>At most she has to buy a new harddisk but not a new Computer.
>2) Linux users are the right audience for Self at the current
>stage because they tend to have a deeper technical knowledge and
>can track down and fix problems by themselves. Usually, Linux users
>have much less inhibitions to use a debugger than Windows or Mac
>users.
>
>Torsten, it would be a pleasure to meet you in person.
>
>Gordon.
>
>
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     David Ungar
     Sun Microsystems Laboratories
     (650) 336-2618