Potato – version of JSqueak from HPI

7 July, 2008

Robert Krahn from the Hasso-Plattner Institut announced this weekend on the squeak-dev list that he and his colleagues have created a SVN repository for their extended version of JSqueak – named Potato (like Dan Ingall’s original VM) – which includes a lot of improvements:

  • support for 32 bit color depth
  • calling Java (in the moment only for strings and integers)
  • refactored code
  • consistent use of Java libraries
  • removed redundancy
  • added a dynamic object table (for loading big images)
  • support for little and big endianness
  • loading of unzipped images
  • fixed lots of bugs and improved usability.
Their plans include further improvements like:
  • adding support for 8 and 16 bit color depth
  • implementing BitBlt warp functionality
  • enhancing BitBlt implementation (“tryCopyingBitsQuickly”, blending)
  • adding save image functionality
  • implementing additional primitives
  • being able to support current images
  • extending Java access
  • finding and removing bugs.
Anybody interested in viewing the work so far, or contributing to future development, can access the code at the following locations:

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