Hi!

On 09/18/2015 01:19 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:

Some of the comments on theregister might need some attention.

Ahh... yeah. I will try to post some replies later today. I need to register there first I guess.

Here some of my questions:

a) I wonder how Ni is related to Nim http://nim-lang.org/?

1. Its implemented in Nim. 2. Its meant to mix with Nim, like using Nim libraries easily etc. 3. It reuses as much as possible of Nim mechanisms, like its GC etc.

b) The Ni article mentinons OrderedCollections and Dictionaries --- where can I find an example which demonstrates how they are used?

I mentioned those classes as a reference to Smalltalkers. Ni only has blocks so far (OrderedCollection) but will also have Dictionaries in the form of "objects" like in Javascript kinda.

Ni is meant to "keep small" and not fatten up like Smalltalk has done with about 80 different collections. ;)

c) Is there a JSON reader and writer for OrderedCollections and Dictionaries?

Hehe, ehm, no? :) But yeah, easy for me to tap into Nim's libraries and add that.

d) What kind of string operations does it support?

Not much at all yet, its still a toy. But I will expose the Nim libraries in Ni so there will be no shortage of functionality. The hard part is to select a reasonable complete subset that is small.

e) The Ni to Nim translator is fairly short.

Its not a translator, its an interpreter. Ni is never translated to Nim. Although one can entertain such thoughts in the future, since Nim has very powerful code generation mechanisms.

  e1) How would a Ni to Smalltalk translator look like? (LOC estimate)

No idea, its hard to... see the usefulness I think.

  e2) Or a Smalltalk to Ni translator (LOC estimate)?

This is more interesting, since I think Ni can be made to look/feel like Smalltalk quite easily. If one would implement a bit of base libraries using the same method names etc, it could map quite easily.

But I don't personally intend to make a "Smalltalk duplicate" - that's boring. I borrow what I like, but renew if I think there is better ways. Rebol has lots of interesting techniques for example.

A silly trivial example, in Ni I can use "?" in method names. So I want to use that as a convention for methods that return booleans. Like the "end?" call in the code sample.

f) Could Ni be an alternative for plug-in writing of Smalltalk?

No, but Nim already is. The SqueakNim tool already autogenerates FFI stubs for Nim, so very easy to use. We use Nim extensively at 3DICC for this.

g) What about speed of compiled Ni / Nim code?

Nim code is basically same speed as C/C++. So very fast. It compiles via GCC by generating very efficient C/C++ code.

Ni is a plain interpreter. I can probably reach Python speeds with it, but I don't intend to go further. For the moment its completely unoptimized and falls short of that, but on the other hand I can very easily tap into Nim for heavy lifting. Much easier than in Smalltalk.

--Hannes

regards, Göran

Hey!

On 09/18/2015 11:47 AM, Peter Crowther wrote:

Congratulations, you made the main headline on The Register as I type this.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/we_are_the_knights_who_code_ni/

Hehe, but that article was.... not an article. Could almost have been written by a robot - perhaps it was.

regards, Göran