Could somene take the time to propose a better class comments?
Stef
Le 2/2/16 15:11, Werner Kassens a écrit :
Hi Clement,
i see, thanks for this answer.
werner
On 02/02/2016 03:07 PM, Clément Bera wrote:
Hello,
Both classes (SmallFloat64 and BoxedFloat64) are present on 32 bits and
64 bits by default right now. The code base is common between 32 and 64
bit images. It is possible to run a 32 bit image without the class
SmallFloat64, but it is not the default behavior. There are no instances
of SmallFloat64 in 32 bits and there can't be any. There are details,
such as the SmallFloat64 class needs to be present to convert a 32 bit
image to 64 bits with the offline converter and if the code base remains
common between 32 and 64 bit images, then the specialObjectsArray will
hold a reference to SmallFloat64 which needs to be updated if one
removes the SmallFloat64 class.
For servers and desktop application it does not really make sense any
more to remove these classes in 32 bits as they represent very few kb
compared to Gb of RAM for laptops and Tb for servers. The Smalltalk
image is already much smaller than let's say, the JVM default runtime.
In addition, most computers are 64 bits now so it usually does not make
sense to release in 32 bits.
On embedded devices, one can consider deploying without classes such as
SmallFloat64 or LargeInteger to minimize the memory footprint. The
support for such feature is not very good currently, but it is getting
slowly better. It could make sense to remove such classes if you are
targeting a connected object with let's say an ARM Cortex-M4. This is
part of a larger problem which consists in making the Pharo Kernel
modular so that we can load only part of it in specific contexts to save
memory or to reduce the system capabilities.
2016-02-02 14:43 GMT+01:00 Werner Kassens <wkass...@libello.com
<mailto:wkass...@libello.com>>:
On 02/02/2016 02:30 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
Maybe those classes could exist in a 32-bit image as empty
subclasses of float ?
that is, what i hope <g>
werner
