Gavinmc42 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 12, 2019 5:55 am
Thanks Tim, that's got it, much better on a Pi4

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Need to see if there is an Aarch64 version for Gentoo64.
Nope, not yet, sorta. Writing a new Cog (the dynamic translation cpu specific part) is non-trivial. You *could* build the non-cogged VM on pretty much any machine that has a tolerable c compiler etc. We have over the past done ports to Windows, Mac, *nix, OS/2, RISC OS, IBM mainframe OS, etc, etc, but the Cog is currenlty only available for x86, x64, ARM32 (and I think a MIPS version that isn't much used). It will, duh, not be as fast as a CogVM because it will be interpreting rather than translating. Having said that a Pi4 might be about as fast(ish) with an interpreter VM as the Pi3 is with a CogVM. I don;t have a Pi4 yet to test out that theory.
Gavinmc42 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 12, 2019 5:55 am
A baremetal version is possible?
Yes, definitely, but it always has costs. What libraries is the baremetal system lacking that support important thing one wants to do? What dev tools does it have? We've collectively done bare or near-bare metal Smalltalks many times over the years and I'm always happy to be paid to do another. There is an elegance to a system where we can simply make a frame buffer and write to it with no X or Mac or Windows insanity in the middle. There's also a not-so-pleasant aspect of maybe having to write your own hardware interrupt handling code; personally I think that is going a bit far; been there, still got the mental scars. In balance I'd tend to stick with something like a linux with no X and grab that frame buffer, unless one found a good frame-buffer+GPU-driver library to work with.
It's also useful for headless purposes; I have a code repository server running on a spare Pi3 that uses simple web requests via the SeaSide web system to provide a quite sophisticated repository (there's a publically accessible instance running at squeaksource.com which of course hosts its own source too). Probably the biggest publicly visible Squeak system is TERF (
https://www.3dicc.com/product-details/) which provides massive online virtual conferencing. And as I demonstrated in the famous giant-fibonacci thread, it's perfectly usable as a scripting/scripted system.