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How to contribute

First, opensmalltalk-vm (a.k.a. the Cog VM) is the virtual machine beneath the Cuis, Pharo and Squeak Smalltalk dialects and one of the VMs beneath the Newspeak language. For issues related to these systems that are unrelated to the VM itself, please use their forums:

Second, the core VM, which comprises the execution engine and garbage collector, and the core plugins, is developed in Smalltalk, using the VM Simulator. This repository contains the code generated by the Simulator, and the platform support code for the entire VM, its CI infrastructure and so on. The core VM should not be developed by editing the generated code. The core VM should be developed using Smalltalk. You can find scripts to build a Smalltalk image in which to do core VM development in the image directory in this repository. You can read about the Simulator here:

The development of the Cog virtual machine takes place on the Cog branch. External contributors have to submit pull requests for review. Core contributors will generally work on the Cog branch by pushing to it directly. However, larger features should be developed on separate feature branches and presented to the community for review through pull requests. Rule of thumb: If you're working on any feature that will take more than a couple of days to stabilize or anything that could potentially destabilize the VM for other people, do it on a feature branch and open a pull request.

TL;DR Workflow

  • Create a topic branch from where you want to base your work.
    • This is usually the Cog branch.
    • Only target other branches if you are certain your fix must be on that branch.
    • To quickly create a topic branch based on Cog; git checkout -b feature/Cog/my_contribution Cog && git push -u origin feature/Cog/my_contribution.
  • Prefer many small commits of logical units that still compile over one large commit. Use git add --patch to review and stage your work interactively or use magit in Emacs or go through the changed lines in the github desktop client. Try to make each commit the smallest possible coherent change that still compiles.
  • Give meaningful but small commit messages. Avoid large "SVN-style" commits where you dump a large number of changes into one commit. You will be thankful later when you need to use git bisect to find where a bug comes from. This also means that you should avoid rebasing or squashing your work. Just keep the history.

Regarding /src and alike directories

Versioning the generated source code is of critical importance for debugging the VM, since it is not possible to guarantee that source files will not differ from another set of source files generated in the same environment. For this same reason, counting with a clean, versioned set of source files makes it easier to check the newly generated source for bugs in parts of the system such as the Slang translator.

C source files are manually generated and committed when necessary by core contributors. Unless source files

  • need to be updated to fix a bug or make available new functionality urgently needed
  • have been carefully checked for bugs that may have been introduced by modifications in parts of the system involved in the generation process
  • are generated from versioned input (i.e. none of the packages to be translated or involved in the generation process are dirty)

it's preferable that no changes to them are submitted.

Integration of GIT with the source tree organization

There are two subtree modules in the Cog branch, platforms/Cross/plugins and platforms/win32/plugins. These are tracked on separate branches in the repository and shared with the oldTrunk branch of development. For contributors this can mostly be ignored, as we can easily split any changes in those directories and cross-merge them across branches. The split is mostly just historical right now, since most development takes place on the Cog branch.

Also, a historical artifact is that we use source tree substitutions. Specifically, any sq*SCCSVersion.h files anywhere in the tree are processed to replace $Rev$, $Date$, $URL$ and $CommitHash$ with the current revision (defined as the timestamp %Y%m%d%H%M of the latest commit), the human readable date of that commit, and the URL of the origin repository these sources were cloned from.

The first time you clone this repository, you must therefore run this command:

./scripts/updateSCCSVersions

This will install filters, post-commit, and post-merge hooks to update the sq*SCCSVersion.h files anytime you commit or merge. If you know your way around Git, you will know when to manually run this file again. If you do not know your way around, please refrain from copy and pasting random snippets you found on StackOverflow to "fix" an issue you have. Stick with the well-known add, commit, push, pull, checkout, revert tools in your workflow.

Using GUI clients

You can use GUI clients (I hear the github desktop client is good), but only after you ran the updateSCCSVersions script.

A note to Windows and other users not on UNIX

You must use some Unix-y (Cygwin or MSYS or some such) layer that provides Perl and a Bash shell and common Unix tools like sed, grep, find, ... . Our scripts are written for that, and the source file replacement scripts probably won't work without such an environment.

Shortcuts for newcomers to Git

If you are new to Git, here are a few tips that will make it easier for you to work within the contribution guidelines:

Getting the code

If you're a core developer, clone the repository and set it up:

git clone [email protected]:OpenSmalltalk/vm.git
cd vm
./scripts/updateSCCSVersions

If you're an external developer, go to github and fork the repository, then clone your fork:

git clone [email protected]:YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME/vm.git
cd vm
./scripts/updateSCCSVersions

Moving to a feature branch

git checkout -b MY-FEATURE-BRANCH-NAME Cog
git push -u origin MY-FEATURE-BRANCH-NAME:MY-FEATURE-BRANCH-NAME

Making, reviewing, and committing changes

You can set up a Git alias that helps you keep commits small and related changes together:

git config --global --add alias.go "!git add --patch && git commit && git status"

Then whenever you want to commit your changes run:

git go

This will go over all the changes in tracked files and you can quickly decide to stage them or leave them out of this commit, then you commit them, and then you'll get status info. Repeat git go until all modifications you want to keep are committed.

For new files, you'll have to add them with git add.

Once you've committed everything and want to get rid of all remaining changes, just run this:

git checkout -- .

Commit Messages

Keep them short. Also, since we're testing each commit on CI, if your changes are only documentation or some other change that does not affect compilation or function of the VM, please prepend [skip ci] to your commit message to not trigger unnecessary builds.

Undoing commits

We do not allow force-pushes to our main development branches. If you want to undo any change, you should use git revert SHA. This will create a new commit with the reverse patch of SHA, thus keeping history intact.

Publishing your work

Every so many commits it is a good idea to push your work. Please refrain from rebasing, unless your history looks like this:

commit 9053988200f86da55c7a599a3e93e6d5a6c4e3c7
Author: Tim Felgentreff <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 28 09:09:49 2015 +0200

    maybe this works?

commit fcede7be5a9347d56670af0d07ac303baba41d31
Author: Tim Felgentreff <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 28 07:17:17 2015 +0200

    try once more

commit 66c6b1b036c4bd90237c575221db0530b850ec17
Author: Tim Felgentreff <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 28 06:51:46 2015 +0200

    try again

commit b8e60620c1285f7e19dbb3ff23e1d201eecb8c24
Author: Tim Felgentreff <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 28 06:44:04 2015 +0200

    try a different build script

(However, if you're unsure what rebasing is, just forget about it and push the history as-is. Seriously, skipping bad commits a bisect is easier than fixing someone's git tree once they have lost commits to the depths of reflog. Especially if their recovery attempts have already triggered a Git GC.)

If you were working on Cog and the change isn't too large, just do:

git push origin Cog

If you were working on a feature branch, do this:

git push origin MY-FEATURE-BRANCH-NAME

If your feature branch is ready or you are an external contributor with your own fork, use the github web interface to open a pull request.

C Source Code Formatting

When editing an existing file, please be polite and first follow the guidelines below, and secondly follow the general rule of keeping to the same formatting conventions as exist in the file.

C Function Declarations

C function declarations should have the type on one line and the function name and parameters on the following line, e.g.:

static int 
convertCopy(char *from, int fromLen, char *to, int toLen, int term)

This facilitates searching for function definitions by searching for the name at the beginning of the line.

Tab stops are 4 spaces

In this case, the first rule is to keep the existing formatting within a file - we don't want to pollute the code history with space changes.

The goal is to use tabs set to 4 spaces.