more than GUI?

Kevin Fisher kgf at golden.net
Tue Sep 12 20:24:53 UTC 2000


[snip]

> 
> 	3. You want a dynamic filesystem on a tar file.  You do
> "TarDirectory  on: tarObject" and start using it.  If you insert this
> object into another directory object, you will have mounted a subdirectory.

*drool*

> 
> Now think how you'd do these things on Macs, Unix, or MS Windows. 
> Painful, huh?  I'll have to numb my mind again after writing this, just
> so I can get some work done on my existing computer.
> 
> For anyone who agrees that this is good, Squeak is a *great* place to
> start.  It already has persistency built in via course snapshots, and it
> has a powerful UI.  
> 

[snip]

> 
> Instead, what keeps coming to my mind is that I can't use existing
> applications from Squeak.  I don't care so much about the exact way the
> filesystem in my OS works, or the way processes are separated.  I would
> if I wrote a lot of C-level programs, but I don't now that I know about
> Smalltalk.  Instnead, what I really like from my underlying OS is being
> able to run existing programs. I like running utilities other people in
> my department think up, a Netscape-compatible web browser, the latest
> video games being put out by Blizzard, and interactive fiction I've
> downloaded.  A Squeak version of all of these would be nice, but the
> existing versions are pretty usable already!

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this myself (which is why I
was asking last week about FFI).  I've got lots of ideas bouncing around
my head right now where it would be great to control native binaries
from Squeak (like an MP3 player).  Specifically I've been thinking
about creating an automotive computer based on Squeak (that plays
MP3's, of course)...


> 
> 
> Reusing these apps from Squeak not as hard as it might seem.  Granted,
> MS Windows programs are an exception, but MS seems to intentionally make
> emulation difficult.  POSIX and XWindows are a different story: they are
> minimal, and most importantly, they are fixed.  I don't know about Macs,
> but a decent Unix+XWindows emulation environment ought to be quite
> reasonable.


Ah...have you heard of Cygwin by chance?  I believe you can find it on
http://sources.redhat.com.  It's basically a port of the base UNIX
and GNU libraries to windows...sort of an MKS Toolkit (and much more)
for free.  It gives you a full build environment and basically turns
Windows into UNIX as much as possible.  There's even a rudimentary
port of XFree86 to Windows underway as well (works decently on
my work NT4 box).

You can compile many UNIX programs right from the tarball, typically...
I believe it comes with GCC 2.91 or better.  I wonder if Squeak
would compile under Cygwin?

(I find that it tends to work better on NT than Win9X typically, due no
doubt to all that 16-bit wierdness in Win9X.)

[snip]

> 
> 
> 
> Overall, an OO OS would be awesome.  Squeak is a great start, and IMHO,
> the next priority is to implement a C execution environment.  And now
> I'm going to numb my mind again.
> 
> 
> -Lex
> 

:)  Imagine being able to embed Mozilla's Gecko engine in Scamper... 





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