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FAQ.md

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Can Cuis-Slang be used as a 1:1 replacement of the existing VMMaker implementation?

Short answer: No. Cuis Slang isn't intended to be a replacement for the production VMMaker version of Slang. VMMaker Slang is VMMaker Slang and is good in it's role. The Cuis Slang packages original intention was to have a simplified framework in place with which FFI plugin libraries can be generated and shipped with external FFI interfacing Cuis packages.

For this scenario it was optimized and re-designed. Also the VMMaker version of Slang has a different class hierarchy, different methods and different style of structuring things, probably for historical reasons. For example the Interpreter in VMMaker Slang is a subclass of InterpreterPrimitives, which the author of this answer finds highly non-intuitive.

Q: Why don't you just use Lowtalk?

Lowtalk is a Pharo Smalltalk specific implementation of a general lowlevel dialect of Smalltalk, so a full language. It's bigger and more tailored to pharo. This means it's more complex and this is again harder to maintain. Also the design of it is targeted for putting the source code of it into files, transpiling/compiling them to the output. This is itself a valid direction for this kind of translation, but not of how the author wants it: no bells and whizzles, just have the basic infrastructure for translating and simulating code.