[squeak-dev] Can we beat 'Processing'?

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Wed Nov 18 02:00:20 UTC 2015


Replied late to this thread and tl;dr (sorry) but linguistically we can
send Processing back to the Stone Age.

It occupies an interesting middle-ground: folks, a lot of them artists, who
are maybe too old for e.g. Scratch, making stuff to run on Arduinos, etc.

We suck at real-time mainly because GC and the operating systems we run
over which are busy with multi-user pre-emptive multitasking and virtual
memory when there's only ever one user and plenty of RAM, etc, but most
people doing Processing aren't liable to be using the micro controllers for
real time applications anyway. It's just a conveniently C-like curly
braced language that compiles down to Amtel machine code. I guess ARM now
too.

It seems like the answer to your question is simply "lead a popularity
contest and win." The longer explanation is most likely "for all but
seriously real-time apps, yes" but that's not the whole game. Most of the
game isn't real-time, and we (in the longer term) should be able to improve
and extend the Slang system to deal with realtime issues in machine
code while the VM just sleeps.

So, I guess I'm saying: in the long game, I think yeah.

--C

On Tuesday, November 17, 2015, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> The Pi just got ‘Processing’. I haven’t looked hard at it but it does look
> fairly simple stuff. I’m pretty sure we could provide something better -
> which is partly why I’ve been looking at B2D & B3D stuff.
>
> Take a look at
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/now-available-for-download-processing/
> for an idea of what it’s about.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org <javascript:;>; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Oxymorons: Military Intelligence
>
>
>
>
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