Why aren't these Disney Python jobs for Squeak?

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Fri Sep 22 18:03:59 UTC 2000


On 22 Sep 2000, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> I can't imagine a CGI "script" written in Squeak no matter how well
> the design would be... the startup cost of launching a new image is
> probably too high.  Of course, they say that about Perl all the time,
> so the point is not to startup a new image - witness Comanche et. al.

I think the way to fascilitate this is through a persistent image.  Like I
mentioned when I spewed my thoughts on the idea of a Smalltalk shell.  A
shell or CGI script would essentially be the same- both would have
something like "#!/usr/bin/stsh" on the first line.  There would be a
small light C program that would connect, perhaps by socket, and return
everything that was in the file with the exception of the hash-bang line.
Very little startup time, as the Squeak image is started up either on
boot, or the first time a stsh script is ran.  All output would be
returned to stdout.  Something like GNU Smalltalk's #printNl method.

With something like this, Squeak CGI wouldn't have to be tied to Comanche,
but could be used from Apache, &c.

There's a small chance I'll change my UROP (undergrad research oppurtunity
project) to this, but I have to talk to my advisor about it still.  I
think it'd be pretty useful for all of us on Unix.

Aaron





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