Re: Linux port progress

[snip]

> I am not at all convinced that developing a distributed smalltalk
> environment is less work than wrappering an existing GUI framework. In
> particular, porting the Squeak BitBlt implementation to Strongtalk
> does not mean starting from scratch, and offers the potential to port
> Morphic and quite a lot of other Squeak tools with a lot less effort
> than a native GUI framework whether wrapped by SWIG or otherwise.

Here, I agree.. porting a Squeak GUI might be another short path to
getting a x-platform GUI going.  I wasn't totally disagreeing with
that..  and I was insinuating that it would still probably be easier
than getting wxWidgets going.

> That said, I don't mean to discourage you if you want to put some
> effort into implementing distributed support for Strongtalk. I am keen
> to encourage anyone who has the time and skills to devote to the
> project. Dive in and get you hands dirty!

I do think doing a distributed smalltalk like system might be not a
bad approach and it may be something I'd like to help out with in the
future..

[snip]

> Actually Artur Lejowski is working on using Eclipse as an IDE, based
> on the recent dynamic language support. This would at least offer a
> more comfortable environment that bang-delimited source files.

Sure, but to do integrated debugging, dynamic updates, etc.. now we're
back into some type of distributed/control mechanism..

> > > Development of wxSqueak appears to have stalled some time in 2005,
>
> > Taking existing work and morping is sometimes easier than starting
> > from scratch..
>
> Maybe, depending on how complete and well documented it is. wxSqueak
> seemed quite a bit short of the mark to me.

Not a big disagreement there either.

> > > there may be licensing issues in using Qt, and wxWidgets appears to
> > > depend on C++ inheritance which won't work with the Strongtalk object
> > > format.
>
> > This I don't understand at all.. what do you mean it won't work with
> > the Strongtalk object format?  If we're using SWIG which generates the
> > C++ wrapper for us, as well as all the Strongtalk C++ classes/code
> > that maps to it, just like wxPython does, what is the problem?
>
> > Cheers, Ian
>
> Am I missing something? Looking at the SWIG for Smalltalk link
> everything appeared to be Windows centric. Is there SWIG/Smalltalk
> support for Linux too?

What is windows-centric about it?  I provide a compiled binary exe
that runs on Win32.. anyone can compile a binary that runs on linux..
SWIG is cross platform by nature, I haven't changed that.  I haven't
gotten around to compiling a linux binary, but it's not complicated
and others have done it.
For my day job, I just run swig on Win32 and use the generated output
on Linux.  (ie. using VW on Linux, compiling/using the output
generated by the Win32 app)
All of it does indeed run on linux and other platforms.

> If so, can you provide a link. In any case,
> separate Strongtalk bindings would need to be defined for the SWIG
> generated so file.

SWIG generates a wrapper dll/so object.. and then generates a bunch of
Smalltalk/strongtalk wrapper code, as well as a bunch of dialect-
specific glue..  such as DLL-C-Connect on VW, etc..  Obviously we'd
have to whip up some simple generation of that wrapper glue for
Strongtalk, but considering I did it for most Smalltalk dialects out
there, doing it for Strongtalk too shouldn't be a very big job and I
plan on doing that at some point in the near future anyways.  So yes,
almost all of the wrappering process is fully automated.

> If this was fully automated, then I could see an
> advantage, but failing that I am not sure why this is much better than
> using say GTK+.
>
> Regards, Steve

Cheers, Ian

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