RE: Why Images Bother People (or, at least me)

["Brent Fulgham" <address@hidden>]

> Squeak has traditionally taken the "kitchen sink" approach, where many
> useful (and not so useful) libraries have been added to the base image
> over time.  There's currently an attempt to slim this down, 
> so that the core is an image of a few hundred k, and extra packages are 
> loaded in as needed.

This would be a big win.  A core that small would actually be faster to start than most commercial offerings (Java and C# come to mind.)

> "Quickly start up" is an interesting point.  Even with large images,
> Squeak typically pops up a window and is ready to go in under 
> a second.  Remember that all it has to do is dump the image file 
> directly into memory - there's no linking, parsing, or initialization
> necessary.

That's an excellent point.  Although, on a heavily loaded system (e.g., a server being used by a group of people) I can imagine even this "swapping" cost would be fairly noticable.
 
It certainly sounds like Squeak is making some neat progress.

-Brent