It is a tool which is very easy to misuse, by forgetting to file out all the changes you make to it.
That is not uncommon in practice. Most (or all?) Smalltalk's come with an image, but there is no source-file telling you how that image was derived, or how you can derive it from some more basic "standard" vanilla image.
That is the reason why it is so difficult to get code developed on one Smalltalk -platform to work on images provided by other vendors. You could say that is caused by "misuse" of the image-tool, but seems like all Smalltalk vendors are doing it.
I ported many projects between different Smalltalk versions, and I never had a bit of feeling that the image concept caused the related issues. Smalltalk implementations are just doing some things differently. The language ANSI standard is too minimal for practical purposes and obsolete. To ruin your basic premise: Common Lisp also uses the image concept, and it is famous for good stability and compatibility among different implementations.
It is a tool which is very easy to misuse, by forgetting to file out all the changes you make to it.
That is not uncommon in practice. Most (or all?) Smalltalk's come with an image, but there is no source-file telling you how that image was derived, or how you can derive it from some more basic "standard" vanilla image.
That is the reason why it is so difficult to get code developed on one Smalltalk -platform to work on images provided by other vendors. You could say that is caused by "misuse" of the image-tool, but seems like all Smalltalk vendors are doing it.