The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday,
January 27th.
For this presentation, guest speaker Michael Engel will bring us back to
basics with a bare-metal Smalltalk-80 system for the Raspberry Pi.
In 2020, the Xerox PARC research laboratory celebrated its 50th
anniversary. One of the most important developments coming out of PARC is
the Smalltalk system, which integrates a programming language, operating
system and graphical user interface.
Today, most of the Smalltalk systems run in hosted mode on a conventional
operating system. This contradicts Dan Ingalls' idea that "an operating
system is a collection of things that don't fit inside a language; there
shouldn't be one". Accordingly, original Smalltalk systems, e.g. for the
Alto workstation, ran on the bare metal of the computer.
In this talk, we will discuss an approach to create a bare-metal
Smalltalk-80 implementation for the Raspberry Pi (
https://www.raspberrypi.org/ ), a popular family of ARM-based systems.
Interesting aspects that will be investigated are the overhead involved in
bringing the system to life and debugging it, adapting the system to
different Raspberry Pi models, and constraints due to properties of the
hardware and the Smalltalk-80 VM.
Michael Engel ( https://multicores.org/ ) is associate professor for
compiler design at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(NTNU) in Trondheim/Norway. His research interests lie on the intersection
of compilers, operating systems and modern hardware. In previous positions,
Michael worked at different German Universities as well as Oracle Labs
Cambridge and Leeds Beckett University. He also was founder and CTO of
kernel concepts, the first German company working with embedded Linux
systems in 1999.
Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting
from home.
If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup
page ( https://www.meetup.com/UKSTUG/events/cbklbrycccbkc/ ) to receive the
meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!
