RE: New member, couple of questions :)

First off, thank you very much for your response, I know your time is 
limited.

>From: "David Griswold" <[email protected]>
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: <[email protected]>
>Subject: RE: New member, couple of questions :)
>Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 13:16:43 +0200
>Please see my post about project direction from 5/1.  Activity on the
>Strongtalk image is minimal; effort will be focused on VM stability, OS
>porting, and a Squeak port.  The problem is that a core group of 
>experienced
>people to work on Strongtalk does not exist, unlike other open source
>projects.  What little time I have to work on Strongtalk will be dedicated
>to the above tasks, and even that work will be slow, since I only have a 
>few
>hours a week to devote to it; there simply isn't anyone who has time to
>coordinate large scale work on the system, or to educate newbies.  I'm 
>sorry
>for the situation, but you must understand that Strongtalk is a system that
>was buried long ago and was only recently resurrected, and all of the
>original VM coders are long gone.

Well, I'm not complaining that the system isn't fully functional ready for 
me, I was offering to potentially help get it there. :)

>Your guess is as good as mine.  I and a couple of other people will be
>starting to work on a Squeak port in a few weeks, but the only goal defined
>so far is to get enough of Squeak running to motivate the Squeak community
>to help; hopefully by that point some more VM documentation will exist, and
>the VM will be a bit more stable, so that there is a better base for a
>bigger development effort to get going.

Ok, my confusion here is just that the systems seem so different the only 
possible way to port it would be to pick some categories, file them out and 
file them in on Strongtalk (e.g. Collections, Streams, Network) and fix what 
breaks.  Of course I could be wrong.

>Whatever you want to do.  If people want to get the Strongtalk IDE running
>on other OS's, something will be needed.  There is no work currently 
>planned
>on this.

Well I was thinking this list might be the place to coordinate such things.  
Or I guess the only people doing anything on this project are working on the 
VM?

>Native thread handling is already there, but it isn't preemptive and the VM
>isn't multithreaded.  Nothing is likely to happen on this front soon.
>
>-Dave

I think it is good for the VM itself to be multi threaded, I just see zero 
value in having in-image Smalltalk processes themselves run in separate 
threads.  Or at least, of so little value that the big effort required to 
support it wouldn't be worth it.

I think the way to go would be to have things like IO be 100% async 
internally, but appear synchronous to Strongtalk processes (exactly how IO 
work in the OS).  That would make it easy to write clear, well factored e.g. 
networking code, but that runs fast.

And I bring this up here, because this kind of decision would need to be 
done early since a lot of things would be built on it (and it sounds like 
someone is about to start on the networking code).

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