Squeak-dev June 2008

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130 participants
143 discussions

C++ parser in Smalltalk?
by Peter William Lount 06 Jul '08

06 Jul '08

Hi, Does anyone know of a working C++ parser written in Smalltalk? Just the front end would be fine, it doesn't have to generate any code. I just want to have a Smalltalk/Squeak program read the darn stuff so I can play with the information. If not what would you suggest as an approach for having one with a minimum of effort? Thanks in advance, Peter

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help us announce esug08
by Mathieu van Echtelt 05 Jul '08

05 Jul '08

Hi all, We made an email to inform potential enthusiasts about Esug'08. (looking at the program, we think esug'08 will become very interesting) If you know any person/mailinglist/blog you would like to inform too, feel free and use the Esug-announcement email below. (One is in English, the other is in Dutch) We already had some success, e.g. the dutch rubyonrails community has put our announcement on their website: www.rubyenrails.nl, with their own introductoin: "...if you want to see the much discussed Maglev VM or the legendary seaside framework, go to..." These lists/groups already received an email from us: - EAPLS - IvI (UvA) - cwi-all - IPA list - se-world - University Delft - Holland open source - Meta-user list - Viewpoints FONC - Rubyenrails.nl - Xp-nl list - Squeak list - Weekly Squeak - VisualWork NC list - University Twente Thanks, Mathieu van Echtelt Tijs van der Storm (local esug08 organizers) English version: ---- [Apologies for multiple copies] Dear software engineer, End of August, a unique conference will take place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This conference is organized by the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG). Smalltalk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk) is a dynamic and reflective language exercising a continuing influence on historic and current developments in programming languages and software technology. This year celebrates the 16th edition of the ESUG conference, which features more than 40 presentations on, among others, the following subjects: Programming Language Platforms: - Newspeak (New open source dynamic language focusing on modularity, security and interoperability) - Cog (New highly optimized open source Squeak VM) - Maglev (Highly scalable Ruby VM) - OpenCroquet (Deeply collaborative, multi-user online Smalltalk development environment) Web Frameworks: - Seaside (The continuation & component-based web framework) - WebVelocity - AidaWeb (Smalltalk Web Application Server) - WebTerminal Model Driven Engineering: - The Meta Environment Language Workbench - ObjectStudio ModelingTool - Fame; Meta-modeling Framework - MBA Smalltalk; to manage your objects Additionally, the winners of the ABN Amro sponsored Innovation Awards will be presented. Are you interested in the latest developments in dynamic languages and Web development, be sure to register as soon as possible at http://www.esug.org. Important information: Conference website: http://www.esug.org/conferences/16thinternationalsmalltalkjointconference20… Time: Augustus 25-29, 2008 Venue: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Kruislaan 413, Amsterdam, Turing Zaal. Directions: http://www.cwi.nl/about/directions.html Hope to see you at ESUG'08! Kind regards [put your name here] Dutch Version: --- (excuses voor meervoudige kopieen) Beste software engineer, Eind augustus vind er unieke conferentie plaats in Amsterdam. Deze wordt georganiseerd door de Europese Smalltalk gebruikersgroep (ESUG). Smalltalk (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk) is een dynamische en reflexieve programmeertaal met een groot verleden en veel invloed op de huidige en toekomstige ontwikkeling van programmeertalen en technologien. Dit jaar is alweer de 16e ESUG conferentie en zullen er ruim 40 presentaties zijn met onder andere de volgende onderwerpen: Programming language platforms: - Newspeak (New open source dynamic language focusing on modularity, security and interoperability) - Cog (New highly optimized open source Squeak VM) - Maglev (Highly scalable Ruby VM) - OpenCroquet (Deeply collaborative, multi-user online Smalltalk development environment) Web Frameworks: - Seaside (The continuation & component-based web framework) - WebVelocity - AidaWeb (Smalltalk Web Application Server) - WebTerminal Model Driven Engineering: - The Meta Environment Language Workbench - ObjectStudio ModelingTool - Fame; Meta-modeling Framework - MBA Smalltalk; to manage your objects Ook zullen er Innovation Awards worden uitgereikt (gesponsord door de ABN Amro). Ben je geinteresseerd in de laatste ontwikkelingen van dynamische programmeertalen en webdevelopment, schrijf je dan zo snel mogelijk in op http://www.esug.org. Belangrijk informatie: Conferentie website: http://www.esug.org/conferences/16thinternationalsmalltalkjointconference20… Wanneer: Augustus 25-29, 2008 Waar: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Kruislaan 413, Amsterdam, Turing Zaal. Routebeschrijving zie: http://www.cwi.nl/about/directions.html Hopelijk tot ziens op ESUG'08! Vriendelijke groet, [put your name here] -- AG5 - Product manager

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Re: [squeak-dev] Perl is to CPAN as Squeak is to (what)?
by Claus Kick 05 Jul '08

05 Jul '08

> > The absence of something like STORE/CPAN that is what is driving me > > towards CST. > > > > The existence of CPAN is keeping me with Perl ;) > The existence of sake/packages to enable me to consistently build and > debug the building of the production image that I want is helping to > keep me sane! (after attempting to achieve what I needed with Universes > drove me mad for a couple of weeks) > > The last thing we need is yet another package management system, when we > have hardly started using the features of the existing ones. I do not think there is need for another package management system, I just think that there should be an agreement on using and expanding _one_, incorporating what is best about all the others. I realize that means stepping on many, many toes and legs and probably even heads, but I think things need to be streamlined a bit. If push comes to shove, I would even say, lets ditch them all and just use SVN like the rest of the planet (if that is possible). It is hard enough to sell a image-based language with a real IDE to the C-style crowd, the package management systems should not add their grain of salt to the soup. -- Claus Kick "Wenn Sie mich suchen: Ich halte mich in der Nähe des Wahnsinns auf. Genauer gesagt auf der schmalen Linie zwischen Wahnsinn und Panik. Gleich um die Ecke von Todesangst, nicht weit weg von Irrwitz und Idiotie." "If you are looking for me: I am somewhere near to lunacy. More clearly, on the narrow path between lunacy and panic. Right around the corner of fear of death, not far away from idiotism and insanity."

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ESUG Awards: first submissions on-line
by Noury Bouraqadi 04 Jul '08

04 Jul '08

Hi, As you can see on http://www.esug.org/conferences/awards2008/ some submissions are commercial products, while others are free software. Dialects vary (Dolphin, Squeak, VisualWorks, ...). And different countries are represented with a strong presence of Argentina. Your country or organization isn't listed? You still have 2 days to submit your software. Please feel free to send me your questions, Noury ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Noury Bouraqadi - Enseignant/Chercheur Responsable de l'enseignement de l'informatique ARMINES - Ecole des Mines de Douai - Dept. I.A. http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/noury European Smalltalk Users Group Board http://www.esug.org ------------------------------------------------------------------

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The Primitive: I am not a number- I am a named prim! - SqueakPeople article
by tim Rowledge 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

I am trying to make time to post a few articles on some future directions I consider interesting for the core system. First one is up at http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/89.html - do please comment on the relevant page, or even here. tim -- tim Rowledge; tim(a)rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Oxymorons: New classic

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presentations, projects, tabbed interfaces, and paper as a UI metaphor
by Brenda 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Quick summary of a long email: I have a couple of months free, which I am thinking of spending writing or helping write some classes that let me treat Squeak as smart paper. To me, this seems related to BookMorph and its subclasses and rewrites, how Projects are treated, and how people give presentations using Squeak. Right now, I am looking for other people who care about this idea or have requirements that should affect the solution, related code that already exists, and collaborators. I don't have set requirements or design notes yet but will send them here for review when I (hopefully we by then) do. Several things have been bouncing around in my head lately: - - I recently resumed work on an application with a tabbed interface which I wrote a couple of years ago. Back then, I rewrote a subset of BookMorph and TabbedPalette to support this since they weren't doing what I wanted and were too crufty for my refactoring skills at the time, but lately I've been thinking about Ned Konz' exhortation to extend others' existing packages vs. write new ones from scratch. - - Also a few years ago, I gave a presentation of an early version of this tool using a StackMorph. It was frustrating to set up despite the very useful tutorial, and very embarrassing when the floating controls disappeared on the second slide, so I couldn't advance to my demo. I see a couple of new options on SqueakMap (one of which is also a BookMorph rewrite) now. - - I've been using OneNote on my Tablet PC, which is a neat concept and is better than the other alternatives I've tried, but doesn't actually do everything I want (plus it's giving in to the Man). - - My computer is not yet as useful to me as a piece of paper, yet it could be so much more! So, I took a deep look at BookMorph (and a shallow look at its rewrites, other presentation software, and the Projects stuff). It seems clunky in places, yes, but there are several really excellent concepts buried in there: - - A page/slide/project. That is, a laid out collection of morphs and behavior that you want to look at/experience together. - - Conscious navigation between pages, including transition effects and sounds. - - Different interfaces for this inter-page navigation: thumbnails, tabs, button controls. - - Navigation on a page: zoom, scroll. - - Templates for pages/slides. That is, a similar layout for several pages, with different data in each. - - Nested pages. I'd like to see one, consistent underlying library that uses these concepts to support presentations, notebooks, tabbed interfaces, HyperCard-like stacks, and projects. I want to be able to easily create presentations and interfaces that work smoothly and that I really like, or at least that nobody has to gripe about. Here's my plan: - - Identify related existing code. - - Identify potential users, opinionated folks :) & collaborators. - - Write up some requirements & design notes, and have whoever cares look them over. - - Refactor, implement or whatever based on the design notes. Existing code I know of so far: - - BookMorph, its subclasses & friends - - SlideshowMorph on SqueakMap (with tests, w00t!) - - Slide Auditor on SqueakMap - - Spiral on SqueakMap - - InternalThreadNavigationMorph & other stuff in MorphicExtras-Navigation - - Projects & World-related stuff If I missed your code, I'm sorry. Please let me know. If you haven't released it yet, I would be very grateful if you were willing to do so, or send me a copy of your working notes/current code/draft. Potential users: - - Folks giving presentations. Based on searches of SqueakMap, conversations about presentation software on squeak-dev, code authors and general scuttlebutt, this includes Stephane Ducasse, Joshua Fein, Bob Arning, Ned Konz, Craig Latta, Lex Spoon, Andreas Raab, and Alan Kay. - - OneNote users. Dunno who this includes beyond me and Ron Teitelbaum but I'm sure there are more of us out there. - - Folks writing tabbed or other page-like interfaces. So far this includes at least me and Cees de Groot. - - Possibly, all Squeak users if the projects & world stuff is really part of this. Looking at the Project stuff might be a second step. What do you think? - - Did I miss anybody in the above categories? Sorry, and please let me know if so. - - Do any other uses leap to your mind? I'll start on the requirements by listing what the existing code seems to be trying to accomplish. If you have requirements beyond this, especially if you are one of the people listed (or who I should have listed) above, please holler. Thanks for listening, if you made it this far, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Brenda -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (MingW32) iD8DBQFIZoSpjIInAF656BkRAk2tAKCR0EkZ7mcCLRbIVfw7diNCDniAegCgpUHS zKSLmhBqlPpWawDYWvyjf1k= =kvNo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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AMB
by Stéphane Rollandin 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

from the class comment of AMB, in the attached sar (coming soon to a SqueakMap near you): this is the "ambigous", "nondeterminist", "angelic" operator aka amb ... more seriously described as a declarative control flow statement able to enumerate over finite domains all values that make a program terminate. it uses continuations to walk the tree of possible tuples, backtracking when the program fails. the amazing thing is the simplicity of the code: four short or very short methods on the instance side, the class side methods only providing syntactic sugar. and it can do incredible things such as: AMB assert: [:string :n :char | (string occurrencesOf: char) = n] over: #('maman' 'barbapapa' 'guiliguili' 'arthur' 'chtulu') and: #(2 4 1) and: #($m $b $a $i $u) see AMBTest for more magic. I would have been unable to implement this by myself ! this is a port of the code by Dorai Sitaram which is the reference documentation for amb: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme-Z-H-16.html#node_ch… Stef

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namespaces, version control, package loading and image release compatibility
by Ken G. Brown 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

I'm thinking a significant part of the problem of namespaces, version control, package loading and image release compatibility is that many versions of methods and classes can exist in the wild but the names do not include any information about their uniqueness. So when you load something it may stomp on methods that are still required in their previous incarnation for something else to work. Possible solution: - every entity and version of that entity for any image be assigned at creation/modification time a globally unique id that stays with that incarnation of the entity forever. So then whenever a package is loaded with whatever new versions it contains, it does not indiscriminately stomp on previous stuff, and everything else keeps working with the older versions as before, unless it is explicitly desired to move to newer versions. Multiple copies of classes and methods could then exist and be used side by side with the same names in the image since messages are sent to their unique identifiers, not just their name which is incomplete since it contains no version info. Of course tools within the image would be needed to manage the multiple existing unique entities with same names in order to easily upgrade and test previous working packages to using the latest versions, but the tools should allow easily going back and forth between versions along with testing until you are happy that the new works well enough and you could then clean out the old if desired. Wait, isn't Spoon going to do this? Ken G. Brown

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Getting rid of Compact classes (Was: Re: [squeak-dev] The Primitive: I am not a number- I am a named prim! - SqueakPeople article)
by Igor Stasenko 01 Jul '08

01 Jul '08

2008/6/30 tim Rowledge <tim(a)rowledge.org>: > > On 30-Jun-08, at 12:15 PM, Igor Stasenko wrote: > >> 2008/6/30 tim Rowledge <tim(a)rowledge.org>: >>> >>> I am trying to make time to post a few articles on some future directions >>> I >>> consider interesting for the core system. >>> >>> First one is up at http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/89.html - >>> do >>> please comment on the relevant page, or even here. >>> >> >> This is not the only things which i don't like. >> For instance look into ObjectMemory>>fetchClassOf: >> it fetching class depending on object header. Either from compact >> classes array (by index), or from slot, reserved for class reference. >> I think eliminating compact classes would simplify the access to >> object's class and free us some bits again: type mask bit (at least). >> >> It also will make fetching a class oop faster and uniform, so there >> will be no branching. >> Fetching a class from Compact classes array, requires: getting oop at >> index in special objects array, and then getting oop from this object: >> >> class := fetchPointer: ccIndex - 1 ofObject: (self fetchPointer: >> CompactClasses ofObject: specialObjectsOop) >> >> A drawback of getting rid of compact classes is additional memory cost >> per each instance of classes which were compact. > > Good points but perhaps for another thread? > > Here is an extended info, from ObjectMemory class comment: 3 bits reserved for gc (mark, root, unused) 12 bits object hash (for HashSets) 5 bits compact class index 4 bits object format 6 bits object size in 32-bit words 2 bits header type (0: 3-word, 1: 2-word, 2: forbidden, 3: 1-word) If a class is in the compact class table, then this is the only header information needed. If it is not, then it will have another header word at offset -4 bytes with its class in the high 30 bits, and the header type repeated in its low 2 bits. ----- So, as you would see, removing a compact classes will free 5 bits in common header , which then can be used by any object for what you mentioned: immutable flag, proxy flag etc. A tradeoff is increasing memory by 4 bytes (in 32bit images) for storing class oop in each instance of classes which were compact. Here the list of classes which is used as compact: Smalltalk compactClassesArray #(CompiledMethod MethodProperties Array PseudoContext LargePositiveInteger Float MethodDictionary Association Point Rectangle ByteString TranslatedMethod BlockContext MethodContext nil Bitmap nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil) And here the code which can tell us, how larger image would be after removing compact classes: | count | count := 0. Smalltalk compactClassesArray do: [:each | each ifNotNil: [ count := count + each allInstances size ] ]. count * 4 In my image its 2315548 extra bytes. The image size is 36368500 bytes. So, in percentage its roughly 6% space increase. I can't measure how faster (or slower) image would be if we remove compact classes, because it requires a conversion :) -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

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VM for production in linux?
by Sebastian Sastre 30 Jun '08

30 Jun '08

Hi there, which version of squeak vm should be used in a linux production environment? I'm using.. "3.9-8 #1 Tue Apr 29 00:24:15 CEST 2008 gcc 4.1.2" installed from http://ftp.squeak.org/debian/ stable main Is that the right one for a linux 32 bit production environment? thanks, Sebastian Sastre

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