"A Smalltalk Image is your entire system. The Image includes all the tools required to interact, customize and add functionality to your system, so Smalltalk’s IDE is a very Integrated Development Environment."
Thats not the case even for someone like me that has been working with smalltalk for only 2 years. The Image is not even the engine that drives smalltalk . Thats the job of the VM that exists in a completely different universe than smalltalk. It exists in the same universe than many other languages do exists and thats the C universe, the universe of the OS. Essentially what drives your system is not smalltalk is C. The diffirence is that for a part of it that is high level enough, Slang is used, a Hybrid language between C and Smalltalk that compiles to C. So while in the image everything is , well almost everything, an object all the way down, in the VM everything is C all the way down. Ironically an image misses the most important tool to even generate this C code and thats the VMMaker that has to be installed separately. And of course there are parts of the system that are coded in pure C, like some core functionalities of the VM and of course plugins and external libraries that the image has to rely on make things happen. Of course the image is still fairly powerful, you can change the syntax, implement high level libraries, IDE tools and much more. But its not the core of the system just another essential part of it. On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 9:24 AM Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> well, i wouldn't need or even want it in memory, so on disk is fine. the >> problem is more likely management of the same. browsing the changes is not >> really convenient. ideally i'd like to see versions in the class-browser >> and >> in the debugger, where on error i could then take a look at older >> versions for >> comparison, and switch to them to see if maybe the last change was the >> cause of >> the error. >> >> greetings, martin. >> >> > There are versions already for methods. So the functionality is there. > > I disagree however with you, I think that changes file was created for the > precise scenarios of an image crash/ lockdown. In that case you may want to > go back through the code and dont remember which method was triggered or > what else was defined and created. In the case going chronologically which > is how the changes file is already organised is far more useful than going > method and class based. > > But I do agree it would be useful to extend the tools working with changes > , but then none stop anyone from doing so and is not that hard to do. >
