Smalltalk scripting (was Re: jpython anyone?)
Lex Spoon
lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Nov 28 22:12:19 UTC 2000
Aaron J Reichow <reic0024 at d.umn.edu> wrote:
> What I've proposed here before is a Smalltalk server and a C client that
> does little more than pass the contents of the script and arguments to the
> server and manage the returned info (exit value, as well a stdout
> stream).
A snapshot is an extremely fast way to boot -- it's just that the
typical Squeak snapshots are pretty big. Stick to images and one VM per script
execution. Try it -- it's not as bad as people seem to think! Even
unoptimized Squeak starts in less than a second, if its image is cached.
It would be better if a script-friendly image was available, but
there's not, so too bad.
(Along those lines, a great thing would seem to be to save script images
as image segments, and then to have separate script-running and
script-development images. The script-running image would be tiny and
thus would load quickly).
Two more suggestions for anyone working on this:
1. Don't try to use a text editor. "Text-file" is not the same as
"script". Use the regular Smalltalk IDE and make your life nice. Also,
save an image, not a fileout.
2. Make sure you have whatever OS-specific extensions are available.
If you're talking about "scripting", quite frequently you want to access
OS-specific resources. For Mac guys, there is AppleScript stuff in the
main image. For Unix and maybe Microsoft guys, there is OSProcess.
-Lex
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