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: