[Newbies] Squeak vs. Smalltalk

[Michael van der Gulik]

On 4/22/09, Mark Volkmann <mark at ociweb.com> wrote:
> On Apr 20, 2009, at 10:28 PM, David Mitchell wrote:
>
>> Very trippy but sometimes frustrating to someone who
>> just wants to build a CRUD GUI.
>
>
> This was a key factor in me setting Squeak aside for a bit. I love the
> syntax of Smalltalk and the tools, but I was amazed at how difficult
> it was to build and deploy a simple GUI application. For example, I
> just wanted to build a GUI with a text field for entering a name and
> an OK button. When the button is pressed I wanted to display a dialog
> box that contains the text "Hello" and the name. The most frustrating
> parts were the layout of widgets and the packages of the application
> which involves a large number of steps.

+1. It's on my TODO list.

> A more recent concern for me is the lack of support for taking
> advantage of multi-core processors. I know someone is working on
> improving this.

Unfortunately the situation here is rather dire. I blogged about it:
http://securesqueak.blogspot.com/2009/03/concurrency.html.

It's fully possible to make a Smalltalk VM that does fine-grained
concurrency, but nobody concurrently has the time(/money), energy and
raw creative intelligence to make one. Until then, Igor's Hydra VM is
the best we have. I'd love to make one, but I haven't put it on my
TODO list because I don't need a concurrent VM. My single cored 1Ghz
Celeron CPU is plenty fast enough.

I'm fascinated by concurrent computing, and I've dabbled in it a bit
as a hobby, but most of what I do isn't CPU bound. There's a lot of
very interesting stuff you can do before you're limited by your CPU
speed.

Gulik.

-- 
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/