[Help-smalltalk] GNU Smalltalk 3.2, good and bad news

[Paolo Bonzini]

The good news is that I think we are very close to a release.  I'll try 
to do it this month.

The bad news is that the state of the Windows port is quite bad once 
more.  This weekend I finally got round to making a binary installer for 
Windows, only to find out that the new GTK+ event loop triggers a bug in 
GLib (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615480).

Among the most important new features of the VM is 0% CPU usage when 
idle.  So, the new event loop is a necessity rather than something nice 
to have, and I cannot (and don't want) absolutely revert it.

For 3.3 I have a plan of merging the GLib event loop into the VM.  If 
the above bug is fixed, this would mean getting rid of much 
system-dependent code in GNU Smalltalk and getting sockets to work 
automagically under Windows too.

I managed to make a relatively small test case, and I'm confident that 
the GLib developers will fix the bug soon.  If so, at least VisualGST 
would work.  However, Windows support in general is officially delayed 
to GNU Smalltalk 3.3.

If you want to peek at the Windows packaging, you can look in my git 
repo at http://github.com/bonzini/smalltalk/commits/nsis

Paolo