[Newbies] Re: Is Squeak/Pharo an appropriate language choice?

Charles Hixson charleshixsn at earthlink.net
Thu Oct 31 21:53:03 UTC 2013


On 10/31/2013 01:28 PM, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
>> If I'm going to need to use a database, and handle my own rolling in and
>> out anyway, then Smalltalk isn't a good choice.  And while multiple
>> processing is only a speed-up thing, that's a pretty important thing in
>> and of itself.
> I think you may need an OODB, you should take a look at Magma
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665.  You may not need to do as much rolling
> in and out on your own as you think.
>
> Lou
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Louis LaBrunda
> Keystone Software Corp.
> SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
> mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com
Short answer:
Probably not sufficient.

Long answer (excuse the rambling, I was thinking it through as I wrote it):
If I'm understanding http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2639 correctly, which 
I may not be, I'd still need to recode the entire graph structure to be 
designed in terms of id#s (keys) rather than direct references.
I.e., I'd need to code it in terms of two collections one of which would 
contain keys that, when interpreted, referenced itself.  This does 
appear to move the plan into the area of the possible, but at the cost 
of the advantage that I'd hoped Smalltalk would provide of a large 
persistent image.  I thought at first when it was talking about 
transparency that this wouldn't be necessary, but:

> Magma *can* maintain and quickly "search" large, flat structures, but 
> the normal Smalltalk collections such as Bag or OrderedCollection are 
> not suitable for this. The contiguous ByteArray records Magma uses to 
> store and transport Smalltalk objects would be impractical for a large 
> Smalltalk Collection
Seems to mean that the Graph couldn't be stored as something that Magma 
would recognize as a graph.  So does "Objects are persisted by 
reachability", though that has other possible interpretations.  But 
since the graph would contain a very large number of cycles in multiple 
"dimensions"...  OTOH http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2638 on Read 
Strategies appears to mean that it wouldn't automatically (or rather 
could be set to not automatically) pull in items that are references 
within the object being read.

Again, http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5722 , may mean that a class with 
named variables holding 4 arrays of arrays of length 3 (reference float 
float) and a few other variables containing things like bools and 
strings and ints, would be handled without problem. But note that each 
of those references is to an item of the same type, and it could include 
cycles.  So I can't decide WHAT it means.  Do I need to recode the 
references as id#s? Does that even suffice?  (If it does, then it's 
still a good deal.  But if I must name each entry separately, it's not a 
good deal at all, as the number of entries in each of the 4 outer level 
arrays is highly variable, and though I intend to apply an upper limit, 
only experiment can determine what a reasonable upper limit is.)

And yet again (if I'm understanding correctly) I'm going to need to 
violate just about every one of the hints on performance in 
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2985 .  I'm not sure how much MagmaArray 
keeps in RAM of things that aren't currently in use.  At one point it 
sounded like 6 bytes.  This is actually a lot of overhead in this kind 
of a system.

Additionally, it appears that Magma doesn't have anyway to detect that a 
reference is "stale" (i.e., hasn't been referenced in a long time), an 
use that to decide to roll it out.  It looks as if this needs to be done 
by the program...but that time-stamp (and a few other items mustn't 
(well, needn't...but I sure would need to overwrite it when I read it 
in) itself be included in the items rolled out.  So I need to solve THAT 
problem.

Magma seems to be a good object database, but I can't see that it makes 
Smalltalk a desirable choice for this project  (It may, this could be a 
documentation problem...either my not understanding it or the 
information not being clear.)  If I'm going to recode the references 
into id#s, then either Ruby or Python make it trivial to turn the object 
into a string (and to reconstitute it later), and they also make it 
trivial to leave out any volatile variables. Perhaps Magma does the 
latter, but this wasn't clear.

Definitely a part of my problem is that I don't have a clear image of 
how I would proceed.  The only examples given were small fragments, 
extremely useful in clarifying points, but insufficient to yield a 
larger idea of how to use things.  (E.g., I have no idea how to do Ma 
Object Serialization, but I may need to implement it anyway.)

Perhaps this is all because I don't really know Smalltalk well...which I 
assuredly don't.  I was hoping to use Smalltalk to avoid the database 
problem, trading RAM (including virtual RAM) consumption for capacity, 
but it looks as if I end up at a database anyway.  And in that case I 
should use a language that I'm already familiar with.  (I'd really been 
hoping that the persistent image would be the answer.)  If I do a 
decomposition I could even get away with using a key-value store.  The 
only problem is that the id# requires lookup via an indirect reference.  
(Is it in the Directory?  If not, get it from the database, if not, it's 
a new value.)  Once I do the recoding of references to id#s, the 
database portion is "trivial, but annoying". But now I've added 
thousands of additional indirections/second.  However, IIUC, Magma would 
be doing that under the hood anyway (as opposed to the image, which 
would be handled in hardware memory translation), and If I code it, I 
can put in things like automatically rolling out when it's stale.  (By 
the way, does "stub" mean remove from memory, or remove from the 
database?  From context I decided it probably meant remove from memory, 
but I couldn't decide whether dirty data would be written before being 
removed from memory, and I couldn't be really sure it wasn't just being 
deleted.  That needs rephrasing by someone who knows what it's supposed 
to mean.)

To me this appears to be, again, not the project that justifies 
implementation in Smalltalk.  Perhaps if I were already experienced in 
Smalltalk I wouldn't see things that way, as Magma clearly means that 
Smalltalk *can* handle doing the project.

Thank you for your suggestion.

-- 
Charles Hixson

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