[self-interest] Snapshot binary compatibility ?

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Fri Jun 28 18:10:55 UTC 2002


On Friday 28 June 2002 09:25, Harald Gliebe wrote:
> could anyone who is lucky enough to own a Sparc and a Mac tell me if
> it's possible to exchange snapshots between these two platforms ?

Yes it is. If you download the Mac and Sparc versions of Self and do a 
"diff" between the two "Demo.snap" files you will find that they are 
exactly the same. And if I remember correctly, I tested the 
"Smalltalk.snap" file I generated on the Sparc on an iMac and it 
worked.

> One
> reason why the sparc-Snapshots don't work on Linux/Intel is of course
> the different endianess of the architectures, but this could easily
> be converted. If the snapshots work on Sparc and Mac, I'll try to add
> this feature for the Linux version.

It would be a good idea to see how Squeak handles this. Having each 
platform save in its native endianess and read in either endianess 
would be the ideal. A simple header word is enough to detect a 
snapshot's format.

BTW, thanks for Linux Self 0.2.2! Just yesterday I had generated a quick 
and dirty Empty.snap from the 4.1.5 sources using the Linux 0.2.1 VM. 
The idea was to let those working in Linux use the latest GUI code for 
their efforts. The Linux specific Self level stuff was missing, of 
course, so I was working on adding that (though with some work arounds 
I actually got the 4.1.5 GUI running in Linux). To avoid having to 
repeat all this work for each release, I was thinking of putting all 
the changes in separate modules (like "linux-hosts.self", 
"linux-foreign.self" and "linux-unix.self").

-- Jecel



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