Re: Strongtalk: planning a way forward

Where to start?

Current status is rather fractured, as I'm sure you've gathered. I'm
not sure of the status of the gcc-prunedtree branch. I suspect it was
a step towards merging prunedtree's code into the mainline by Dave G
before he moved one. I'm responsible for the Linux aspects of the gcc-
linux branch, which I created. It is based on a version of
prunedtree's gcc port which also has the assembler portions replaced
by C or dynamically generated assembler courtesy of Strongtalk's
builtin assembler, and dates back to r36. Essentially, it is a dump of
my Linux work so far and as such a work in progress.

The linux port is partial so far, but it does enough to run a basic
non-UI test from the command line. You will need an updated image to
run it. This has NOT been checked in (images are about 2M and the
current limit it 100M). Building this image requires a Windows
environment. Images are still built organically (grown!?); there is no
image bootstrap currently. It's one of the outstanding issues. If you
are interested I can upload a copy of the image and sources to
sendspace.

There are many more aspects required to fully enable a linux port. The
os_linux.cpp module needs to be completed and a core to the UI needs
to be built. We should certainly have some discussion on a widget set
to base the UI upon. Qt had been suggested at one stage, but nothing
has been built so far, so it's basically a blank canvas.

Not that I want to discourage anyone enthusiastic to get involved, but
it is my opinion is that porting to other OSes would be a distraction.
There are few active members on the group (as you can see from the
group traffic). Diluting our resources by trying to tackle too many
issues in parallel could easily be counterproductive. That said, this
is opensource. We rely on people's voluntary contributions. No one can
force you to work in one area rather than another. It is up to you
where you devote your time.

As to Squeak, for good or ill, there is a significant amount of Squeak
code out there. Some of it is even pretty good! Joking aside, Squeak
has a lot more in the way of development support tools than does
Strongtalk. In particular, Strongtalk does not provide a UI based
debugger. The primitive debugging it does provide is through the
command line. There has been some interest in a (possibly partial)
port of the Squeak image to the Strongtalk VM to take advantage of the
Strongtalk recompilation technology, however there are some
significant issues to deal with. For a taster take a look at Dave G's
outline notes on Wiki.

My personal goal is to complete the Linux port.

If you're interest is Smalltalk coding rather than the guts of the VM,
then for a while you are going to find life much easier under Windows,
though I believe the Windows VM has been run under VMWare and Wine on
Linux.

Hope I haven't put you off too much.

talksmall

On Nov 28, 10:59 pm, Brian de Alwis <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi everybody.  I'm an absentee smalltalker who would like to play with
> this beautiful language again.  I've heard amazing things about
> Strongtalk's performance (and can't seem to bring myself to use
> Squeak!) and would like to help move this project along.
>
> Unfortunately I'm not sure how to get started.  And I haven't been
> able to detect any sense of direction.  My apologies if my sending
> this message is stepping on anybody's toes, but with Dave's departure,
> I thought this might try to get some conversation going.
>
> My personal interests are to get a simple environment up and running
> so I can fiddle with some Smalltalk code with graphs.  I currently run
> NetBSD on an i386, which is reasonably close to Linux, and will be
> shortly moving to the Mac.  So I'm looking to find the gcc
> compatibility changes and then start to see about a port to wxWidgets
> (in the absence of anything else?).
>
> I see three branches in the repository and some recent commits, but I
> haven't found any discussion about the intent for these branches, nor
> ideas for re-integrating back into the head.  I'm guessing gcc-
> prunedtree is for prunedtree's experimentation?  gcc-linux is
> presumably to get a build process into shape suitable for Linux -- and
> hopefully other Unix-like OSs?  Are these branches being periodically
> synced to head?
>
> Brian.
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