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:
SVN repository: https://potatovm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/potatovm
Sourceforge project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/potatovm/
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