Smalltalk & Squeak featured on Slashdot

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Thu Apr 26 05:48:10 UTC 2001


Bijan Parsia <bparsia at email.unc.edu> may perhaps have mistaken my drift.
	A shrinked image (with MVC and IDE) can prolly still come in under
	1MB. 

Indeed it can.  But as has been pointed out by others, it doesn't work.
I've claimed the smallness of shrunk images myself, but the one I got from
MajorShrink has falllen over enough that I've stopped trying to use it.

As for what "probably" can be done, a proof by demonstration would be mighty
nice.

	With Morphic and a few other yummies you should be able to stay under
	2.5 or so.
	
Ditto.
	> It would be interesting to know roughly where the space is going.
[by topics]

	Hmm. I'm surprised at that. Scamper (for many things) is pretty nippy for
	me. 

Ah, but *my* machines are only about 250MHz.

	But here's a tip to help figure some of this out. SystemDictionary has a
	few useful space analysis tools in the miscellaneous protocol,
	especially #spaceTally. From it's comment:
	
Yeah, I know about that.  But "topic" ~= "class".
Even "topic" != "class category".

	Which, of course, doesn't cover much of the scamper classes. So I ran
	this:
	
	| categories |
	categories := #(#'Network-Url' #'Network-Web Browser' 
		#'Network-HTML Formatter' #'Network-HTML Forms' 
		#'Network-HTML Parser Entities'
		#'Network-HTML Parser' #'Network-HTML Tokenizer').
	categories := self select: [:i | categories includes: i first category].
	categories inject: 0 into: [:total :i | total + i second + i fourth] 
	
The trick is knowing *which* categories to include.

If there were good *documentation* for the HTML parsing and formatting stuff,
I would have a use for it, and would be able to contribute to its development.
What one considers "bloat" depends on what one _can_ use or not because of the
presence of adequate or inadequate documentation as well as what one would
find useful.

	Now, testing for beginsWith: 'Morphic' gets us:
	
		 3379693
	
	Bloat at last!!!
	
Except that now I've seen some decent tutorials, Morphic is no longer
bloat *for me*.  Documentation, documentation, documentation!

	> Is _any_ Smalltalk dialect used for such
	applications [i.e., shell scripts and cgis--ed]?  I suppose
	> GNU Smalltalk or Budd's Little Smalltalk might be usable.
	
	SmallScript is certainly targeted to those applications (among
	others). Quick start up and dynamic loading are big features (it doesn't
	store an image, but always reconstitutes one from files).
	
Never heard of it before.  Where do I find out more?





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