Whats happening with IronSmalltalk ?

Tue Aug 19 16:30:01 UTC 2008

The way I envisaged this progressing was to proceed much like they did with
IronPython; creating a tokenizer, a parser and an AST. I would also envisage
moving away from an image based model to a file based model. I’m sure there
are many out there who see this a blasphemy but I always saw this as an
impediment to Smalltalk being taken up by the general programming
population, even as far back as Smalltalk /V I saw this problem with me
fellow devs.

As always, comments welcome.

Regards,

Gary

HYPERLINK "http://www.garyshort.org"http://www.garyshort.org

From: uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Robert
Johnson
Sent: 18 August 2008 04:28
To: UK Smalltalk events
Subject: Re: Whats happening with IronSmalltalk ?

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 <HYPERLINK
"mailto:steve.wart at gmail.com"steve.wart at gmail.com> wrote:

I took a look at the latest snapshots of the IronRuby code from
svn://HYPERLINK "http://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby"
\nrubyforge.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 HYPERLINK
"http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163344.aspx"
\nhttp://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 HYPERLINK "http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython"
\nhttp://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 HYPERLINK
"http://www.refactory.com/Software/SharpSmalltalk/"
\nhttp://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 <HYPERLINK
"mailto:steve.wart at gmail.com" \nsteve.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 <HYPERLINK "mailto:gary at garyshort.org"
\ngary 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

HYPERLINK "http://www.garyshort.org" \nhttp://www.garyshort.org

MVP C#

From: HYPERLINK "mailto:uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org"
\nuksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:HYPERLINK
"mailto:uksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org"
\nuksmalltalk-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Robert
Johnson
Sent: 14 August 2008 13:30
To: HYPERLINK "mailto:uksmalltalk at lists.squeakfoundation.org"
\nuksmalltalk 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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