Whats happening with IronSmalltalk ?

Mon Aug 18 03:28:00 UTC 2008

Sorry I haven't communicated sooner but I am fighting off a cold.

Gary I definitely have time to work on this project starting next week.

I think agree with Steve when he says: "The easiest way to get this up and
running would probably be to have a look at SmaCC and #Smalltalk"

Why reinvent the wheel when there is a working model to create a baseline
for an IronSmalltalk implementation. I have been in contact with one of the
authors of #Smalltalk and he was great about answering a few questions.
Tomorrow I am going to take another look at the #Smaltalk code and
implementation.

I'm open to any other Ideas that you and Steve ma have.

Robert

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Steve Wart <steve.wart at gmail.com> wrote:

> I took a look at the latest snapshots of the IronRuby code from svn://
> rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby but I wasn't able to build it this time.
>
> There's an in-depth article about the DLR and IronPython at
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163344.aspx. Python builds
> nicely and you can execute sample scripts but the code seems to have been
> refactored quite a bit since then and the tutorial is now quite hard to
> follow. The source is at http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython - you will
> need to install TortoiseSVN and a thing called SvnBridge to get the latest
> code from Microsoft. The license is BSD-compatible.
>
> Both these projects and the underlying DLR seem to assume that dynamic
> languages are scripting languages. I think that this is not entirely
> consistent with the way Smalltalk works, but I suppose there's no reason you
> couldn't build a Smalltalk compiler that works as a scripting language. You
> would need to do something like this to bootstrap the environment anyhow.
>
> One of the things I like about Smalltalk is that all the tools (e.g.
> Transcript, Workspace, Code Browsers and Debuggers) are all written in
> Smalltalk (it's tortoises all the way down!). I think it would be
> interesting to implement these components in a library that could be loaded
> into an application domain for development purposes. I don't think that
> using vim or emacs to develop Smalltalk code would be particularly
> productive and some native tools would provide a more incremental
> development environment than Visual Studio.
>
> To get started on a project like this I guess you would need to have a look
> at building a Smalltalk Language Provider. The easiest way to get this up
> and running would probably be to have a look at SmaCC and #Smalltalk - I
> think the parsing and code generation would be much the same whether you're
> targeting the CLR or the DLR.
>
> A key milestone might be to have something that's self hosting. If the DLR
> was packaged as a DLL instead of a project dependency, then you could write
> the compiler in Smalltalk instead of C#.
>
> The code is here http://www.refactory.com/Software/SharpSmalltalk/ - I
> think it's already self-hosting on the CLR. I believe that John Brant
> discussed some of the conceptual differences between Smalltalk and .NET on
> comp.lang.smalltalk a few years ago.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 7:06 AM, Steve Wart <steve.wart at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Could be interesting. I'm not using Windows much anymore but my PC should
>> be here in a couple of weeks. I managed to build IronRuby from source at one
>> point. Based on what I've read on various blogs it sounds like it should be
>> possible to extract the DLR from that, but maybe your contacts in MS can
>> point us at a DLR-specific svn repository ;-)
>>
>> I suggest we set up a google or yahoo group to drive into the details.
>> Anyone who's interested in helping or lurking can follow along there.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Steve
>>
>> 2008/8/15 Gary Short <gary at garyshort.org>
>>
>>>  Hello Robert,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> With regard to IronSmalltalk, I started it up just after I came back from
>>> the MVP summit in Seattle, I'd been talking to the dynamic languages team
>>> out there and got really fired up about the idea. As normal, right after I
>>> posted about it I got swamped with work and so, to date, it has gone
>>> nowhere. However, coincidentally, I am now in a position to start working on
>>> it again. I'm in the process of getting my head around the DLR and the ANSI
>>> Smalltalk spec so, as yet, no actual code has been written, but I'm going to
>>> be getting to that soon (for some definition of soon <grin>). As for do I
>>> need help? Hell yeah! LOL, are you (or anybody else) interested?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Gary
>>>
>>> http://www.garyshort.org
>>>
>>> MVP C#
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From:* uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:
>>> uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] *On Behalf Of *Robert
>>> Johnson
>>> *Sent:* 14 August 2008 13:30
>>> *To:* uksmalltalk at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>>> *Subject:* Whats happening with IronSmalltalk ?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In May there was some discussion between Gary Short and Steve Wart* *about
>>> the creating an IronSmalltalk implementation. Is someone currently working
>>> on IronSmalltalk ? If so do they need any help?
>>>
>>> Robert Johnson
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>
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