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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Updated VM's for VW 5i.4
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
On all platforms, several primitives that had incorrect argument counts have been fixed. These incorrect argument counts could have caused crashes when primitives failed (but only when they failed).
On all platforms, the oldSpace allocator now uses a sane approach to calculating the free-list probe count. This should improve image-level MemoryPolicy behavior.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed that caused a crash when using the TimeProfiler due to incorrect stack management in primitive Context>>#terminateTo:.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed that caused a crash in the debug and assert engines when using the check-mark mechanism to verify the incremental collector when running with -o11s (aggressive assert checking).
On IA-32 platforms (Windows%AE and Linux86), these engines fix a performance problem with floating-point primitives on dual Xeon processors. Floating-point performance is about 4.8x faster.
On UNIX%AE platforms, signal handlers now use significantly less stack space.
On the SGI%AE platform, "dirty sends" have been enabled, improving Smalltalk execution performance by about 5%.
On the Windows platform, a bug was fixed that caused attempts to open files larger than 4 Gigabytes in read-append mode to not seek to the end.
On the AIX%AE platform, the translated floating-point primitives have been implemented providing almost a factor of two improvements in floating-point performance.
Bugs Fixed in 5i.4b and 5i.4c Over 5i.4:
On all platforms, a bug was fixed in the \\ primitive.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed in context management during non-local returns that would occasionally cause crashes.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed in the code generator that caused | i | i := 2. ^3 between: i and: (i := 4) to return false.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed whereby doesNotUnderstand: method lookups were not being flushed when requested.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed in the translated floating-point primitives whereby aFloat op anInteger would return different results to aFloat op (anInteger asFloat).
On all platforms, a bug was fixed that accused the snapshot primitive to incorrectly save the free list, causing a crash on image load.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed that would cause a remembered-table overflow on loading a perm-saved image, causing the image load to abort.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed whereby code referencing new literals might not be correctly scavenged, causing a crash.
On all platforms, a bug was fixed whereby shrinking oldSpace could corrupt the list of oldSpace segments, causing a crash.
On all platforms, long-long access primitives were added, improving the performance of [unsigned]LongLongAt:[put:].
On UNIX platforms, a bug was fixed whereby attempts to list the contents of directories mounted over nfs would return an invalid list of files.
On X11 platforms, a bug with fetching and storing the text selection was fixed.
On Windows platforms, the priority of the IO poll thread was corrected.
On Windows platforms, bugs with zlib decompression of images were fixed.
On Windows platforms, bugs with 64-bit file access were fixed.
Customers with support should already have received an email to this effect, but I know how many spam filters kill automated emails (even those that are actively being subscribed to).
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