New subject: Squeak/Pharo VM fork history (was: RE: [Pharo-dev] Squeak and Pharo speed differences)

17 May 2020

      To clarify about the VM fork: few years ago, the transpiled C source code of the VM, along with the genuine C parts and core plugins, were migrated to GitHub under the common name OpenSmalltalk VM, to be shared by Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and Newspeak.
But a few months ago, Pharo eventually decided to fork the repository and proceed to make their desired changes to the VM promptly and without the need for mutual agreement. They can progress faster now, but we have another fork.
Why was this done?  Are there details I can read about the technical decision process.   Eliot’s comment about the forked seemed negative—that it should not have happened.  I agree.  I don’t have any more details.
Since the only shared mailing list at the moment is vm-dev
Thanks for saying so.  I was wondering.
(although I don't know whether that is still true since the fork), that is your best bet. Of course you will miss out Squeak and Pharo members not subscribed to the vm list,
Right.  Why is there no common list that we all want to watch?  That doesn’t seem health, either.
so there is not really a nice way to address both communities widely and reliably at the same time and have a connected discussion.
That’s what I want.  I also want to involve the Verona group in the context of parallelizing the VM Pony-Orca-style or eventually Pony-Verona-style if that happens (which apparently seems to be their objective).  I need to talk to those guys first, though.  When the time comes to share those convos with Robert and other VM folks, clearly I want as many Pharo and Squeak people as possible to see that.
Can we have a common Squeak/Pharo mailing that is not so VM-specific/specialized as to leave some of the Squeak/Pharo contributors/users uninterested in subscribing?   “OpenSmalltalk-dev” or “OpenSmalltalk-gen”?  Something like that.
At least no way that I know of. I just wanted to ensure you are aware of the fact that you might not get counterarguments or other perspectives where some are due.
Yes, thank you.
Looks like the text editor has diverged in Pharo as well. In Squeak, what I described works (at least in my image and I don't remember changing anything about text editing): you can toggle the selection of a whole word with a separate single click (can be any number of seconds after the first) on the cursor position.
Yes, you’re right; the click pattern is as you say in Pharo 9, but it’s still slow. It is however, much faster than Pharo’s text selection, much more tolerable, but still somewhat distracting.  VW selection is still much faster than Squeak’s.
It is not so in Pharo (I have a Pharo 8 image here), so my speculation about the click handling is no "excuse" that explains the delay there, but maybe the underlying event handling is still waiting for two separate single clicks in a short time frame. Would be nice if someone rectified my assumptions, if they know better. Anyway the selection in Squeak is quick enough for me personally to not be bothered by it.
It's just barely okay for me.
Does anyone know how the text selection algo works in Squeak and Pharo?
By dropping Morphic I meant that as soon as Pharo no longer needs it, they will probably not include it in the "default"
image/configuration. As soon as this happens, someone would have to make sure that Morphic still works when loaded into a Pharo image.
Right.  Does each framework have an unofficial caretaker/maintainer?  That’s how it seems.
Otherwise Morphic in Pharo will rot and eventually become unusable, and so will applications programmed with Morphic. And I doubt that this maintenance effort of Morphic in Pharo will happen on behalf of the official Pharo leadership.
Must maintenance/inclusion of any framework depend on official Pharo leadership?  Official pharo leadership == Consortium?
Someone has to coordinate?  Arbitrate?  I don’t know.  Vote based on measurements all participants can verify?  That’s sounds better.
Incidentally, in the early days Pharo adopted several new packages or factoring styles that were not accepted in the default Squeak image yet for whatever reason, coupling them more tightly with the base system. For example, the new file API (not the VM primitives, but the Smalltalk API) which was just an add-on package for Squeak in the beginning, or the usage of Traits in the core packages, which means you cannot unload the Traits package.
Traits are becoming part of the basic machinery, aren’t they?  I have something I want to do with them.  I’m not convinced yet that they are in final form.   Is their presence a big problem for anyone?
For file handling we need agreement on what works best, so that we can include that in the base image if your image needs to handle files.  It should still be unloadable if you don’t want file handling.
If Traits are as basic as Class and Behavior, they can’t be unloaded.  Do you want Traits to be loadable?  If so, we need no-trait and trait-using versions of frameworks, which is probably worse, assuming Traits have general utility, which they do, even if the details need some work.  Do you want the file API to be loadable?  If so, Traits probably have to stay in the image, because they might be used in the core at some point.  If you want Traits to be loadable, a no-traits and trait-using file API may both need to be maintained.   The core dependency tree for classes/packages probably isn’t reviewed by every developer before it is fixed in a way that makes change hard.  Is that thinking process exposed to the community before a decision is made?
Pharo has since then tossed out the original file API and w.r.t. traits may have redefined what "the core" is... Maybe Squeak and Pharo do not mean the same things or do not draw the same lines when they say "completely modularized". With respect to Morphic, maybe Pharo wants to replace some subsystems with more professional-looking alternatives, and not maintain so much self-built technology. It is not entirely impossible to have different UIs in Squeak either (it still has the legacy Smalltalk-80 MVC GUI
Do we agree that Spec2 is a better architecture than the original MVC?  It’s similar in the basic ways, but uses a pluggable backend renderer.   Does anyone still want to use MVC now?  Why can’t we still keep it and load it if needed?  Does it break something?
which you could use instead of Morphic, and there is a basic console interface). The questions are 1) would a particular backend be supported by the official distribution (Morphic in Pharo? GTK in Squeak?),
Should we test prototypes of each back end, and decide to include one based on performance results?
I’m not sure what “official distribution” means.   The distribution would be more fine-grain, a version of a package or a version of a class.  I that what it means?
2) which APIs are supported and stable to build applications with (ToolBuilder vs. Morphic vs. GlamorousToolkit vs. Spec vs. Block and Brick vs. GTK-binding vs. whatever), and 3) is anything of the API reliably available in both Squeak and Pharo, without duplicating a lot of code? At the moment, not even the Collection API is entire compatible, as I said.
Regarding "Morphic primitives", to my knowledge Morphic builds on the event input primitives, and uses the Graphics API (pens, lines, shapes, colors, fonts etc.) to draw, which in turn relies on BitBlt primitives for rendering. I am not sure whether one could implement Morphic on top of GTK without compromises.
I’m not sure either.   GTK is very flexible though.
With just enough effort, you can probably make anything happen... But the resources of the community are severely limited, especially for Squeak.
The aim with a single Smalltalk is to free up resources for future development.  There is short-term dev cost to make that happen.
Shaping
Am Sa., 16. Mai 2020 um 14:47 Uhr schrieb Shaping < mailto:shaping@uurda.org shaping@uurda.org>:
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== First, on the text selection delay issue. ==
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Now that you mention it, the text seems to get highlighted slightly slower than in native Windows widgets or WordPad (which is what I had available for comparison). But it also behaves differently.
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Please try the following and report whether you experience the same
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delay: 1) click into the middle of a word with a single click - it
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won't get highlighted,
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Correct.
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click again at the same cursor position

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How soon after?  If more than a small fraction of second, this is just another single click.
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the whole word should be selected now.

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No, not unless this is a double click.  If I do a double click (splitting a double click into two different click locations is almost impossible), then the text highlights with a noticeable delay.
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Is the reaction to the second click also too slow?
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There is no response to the second click except to place the cursor in the same place again.  A rapid sequence of clicks (double-click) must happen to cause selection.
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In regular Windows widgets you have to double-click, not click again, to toggle word selection. Your experienced delay might therefore be associated with Squeak/Pharo processing two consecutive single clicks and the OS widgets processing one proper double click event. But that's only speculation on my part, I didn't check the code.
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These are Pharo windows, not native Windows windows.  I’m doing the tests in a Pharo 9 Playground.  It follows the same selection protocol as a native window:  a double click.  Pharo has its own event loop, like VW, right?
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== Second, on the divergence of Pharo and Squeak == from my perspective and I have not been around at the time of the split yet.
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A general note: you will obviously get biased views from each side and
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the other one might view them as unfairly presented (which makes such
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discussions unproductive quickly). Moreover, much of the divergence is
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not in the VM but in the image,
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No good reason for image divergence has been given yet.  The Pharo effort to modularize completely, if successful, gives all Squeak and Pharo Smalltalkers what they want:  painless, reliable/predictable, deep fine-grain reconfigurability of the environ.   Is there something else to want here?  What does the bold stuff not cover?
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so you might not even be talking to the right people on the Squeak side. Since not everyone is subscribed to both (or all three) mailing lists, they might not see all the answers, so you cannot have a coherent discussion at all.
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I might not be mailing to the right lists.  Feel free to make suggestions.
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To start with the example, I suppose the new preferences look has probably not gotten from Pharo into Squeak not because the Squeak community did not like it, but because it was simply not contributed back. The Squeak folks would have had to pull it and probably did not deem it important enough (or were not even aware if they don't use Pharo regularly).
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Yeah, that’s a problem.
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Besides, the preferences in Squeak are also not a flat list, they have had categories for ages.
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The categories are in an alphabetic list.  It should be a tree.  The list is too long and doesn’t show any organization besides the alphabetic ordering.  That’s the point.  There is one invisible root and  a wide first level—not much branching.  Two levels.  Also, the subitems in each category are sometimes alphabetic and other time not.   I’d have to study the options for a week to determine what I would do differently, but I don’t like the first impression this gives.  There is some sense of subcategory, like several contiguous browse* items or syntax* items, but these groups should be in subnodes.  I’m seeing three of four levels.  I’m not sure.  It would take some study.  It doesn’t feel coherent and compelling.  It doesn’t pull me in.  It looks like a bunch of miscellaneous details.  The Settings browser makes pretty get sense, yes?
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If the Squeak community was busy all the time pulling things
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--Not all the time, just what you can use when you need it.  I don’t think the need for tree is perceived beyond the two levels.
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back from Pharo, they could not concentrate on their own efforts.
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Can you tell me about those efforts?  I know the VM is one, maybe the biggest.  What else do Squeak folks work on?
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I also understand why the developers of the new Pharo preferences tree did not like to invest the same effort in Squeak. What incentive would they have?
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Make all features (GUIs/frameworks) loadable into a new, mostly empty image. Make all aware of those features.  Knowing that this will happen for all feature-work contemplated will lower the threshold to doing the feature-work.  A Squeak dev will learn about the Settings feature, for example, and adapt it if he wants.  If we have the same basic graphical framework, there is nothing to adapt (to Morphic).  It just works.  Yes, the transition is painful.  And there is always a new transition coming as new tech surfaces.  We need a way to deal with that systematically without killing creativity and without creating so much disruption that commercial interests are wary of the environ.
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And here we are. Such differences and the additional effort are the liability of a fork, for both sides. Some people are or were active in both communities to invest the effort. For example, Eliot also provided the image side of VM improvements to Pharo, not only Squeak, if I remember correctly. I don't know whether he still does that since the fork of the VM.
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What fork of the VM?  Please explain.
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Pharo would like to get rid of Morphic; as far as I know, Squeak embraces Morphic for its direct manipulation interface and UI discoverability (inspecting Morphs and such).
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Right.
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GTK has its inspector, but I don't know whether you get the same features out of it. Direct manipulation probably not, only indirect. And can you control that inspector from Pharo or do you have to write C code to change it in GTK itself? From my impression, this would be a no-go for Squeak. The tools must be maintainable in Smalltalk, working with C is a necessary evil in the VM. Maybe Pharo has found a way to have the best of both worlds, I don't know.
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I don’t know much about GTK yet.  I’ll get to it.
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Still that leaves all Morphic applications behind; their UI (or even the entire program) would have to be rewritten from scratch. I doubt that Pharo will keep Morphic workable once they can drop it from the mainline.
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I don’t understand.  Drop?   Why?  If Morphic works and someone wants it, then keep it.   Are you saying it would be dropped because it cannot be satisfactorily re-implemented with the GTK3 backend?  What’s wrong with keeping Morphic primitives?
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And Spec2 is not the first new idea of UI technology in Pharo, you know. In return, the different technology makes it harder for Squeak to port new features even if they wanted to, making it less likely to happen. Even some basic Collection API has changed in Pharo (string trimming and joining for example), now try to keep your code compatible with both without messing it up...
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Yes.  The “port” is only difficult once if the aim is thereafter to work from a common base image.  But there will be more ports and conversions.   Is there a system on either side for managing incorporation of new tech, libraries, and standards?
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The compatibility and porting problems are offloaded to the application and library developers, even between Pharo releases. I don't know how this can be advertised as appealing to commercial development. VisualWorks & Co.
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could certainly not deal with their users that way.
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This happens in any case.  That it happens in one image and not two is better.
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I don't think that Pharo does bad stuff in general, in fact their work could be very good (I don't look at it regularly and certainly don't follow the implementation). Like you said, disentangling, modularization, test automation, and innovation are valuable goals.
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Squeak mostly agrees on the goals, but does not pursue them in the same disruptive manner. Probably this is the "pushback" you have been told of...
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Right.  How does squeak do things less disruptively?  I agree that the innovation on the Pharo side is accompanied by almost as much bloat and confusion, especially for new comers trying to port.  What is the Squeak way of improving the frameworks and using new tech, like 3rd part libs?
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If Spec is a UI generalization framework that makes it independent
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from the graphics implementation,
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Yes, that’s the aim.
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then one should rather compare it to Squeak's ToolBuilder, not Morphic. ToolBuilder as well could have different targets, such as GTK, (I have seen Squeak tools rendered with some Java UI Framework a few months ago) but nobody pushes that in the Squeak trunk. There was no voiced demand.
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I don’t know ToolBuilder.  Perhaps I should have a look.  Why would the best of both TB and Spec2 not be used in a common base tool-building framework, which sounds broader than what Spec2 does, but may not be?  I don’t know enough of TB to say.
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How is framework adoption/inclusion decided?  The dev who writes the framework first and demonstrates utility first with that framework will have it included in the base image?  Just thinking aloud.  How does it work?  How do you want it to work?
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I haven't participated in such discussions of the right way™ in the past, but my impression from what I heard so far is that Pharo pushes forward rigorously and does not look back, and if it does, then sometimes with a disparaging or snappy tone.
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Does this mean that Pharo folks are unfairly critical of old frameworks in order to push the new thing (whatever it is) along?
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Some of the Squeak guys are therefore very sceptical about Pharo and their attitude, to say the least, and sometimes also talk harshly.
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I can see how that might happen.  Too many changes too quickly doesn’t look like innovation to some.  It looks risky, especially to commercial interests, but clearly the consortium don’t want this view.  It’s not healthy for Pharo or Smalltalk.
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The recent fork of the VM further deepens the trenches,
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Okay, this must have been the fork I saw Eliot mention a few weeks back.  I don’t know the details, but it sounds like a bad idea.
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especially since the foundation of "OpenSmalltalk" VM (no longer
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"Squeak" VM) was in my perception a commitment to cooperate at least
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on that end. There are probably only a bunch of persons who are
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responsible for the bad mood, and I assume that the majority of both
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communities are in fact friendly people. :-)
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So it seems, but I don’t know the details.  I prefer to focus on the tech, not personalities and self-esteem issues.
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Thanks for the perspective.
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Shaping
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Am Sa., 16. Mai 2020 um 08:40 Uhr schrieb Shaping < mailto:shaping@uurda.org shaping@uurda.org>:
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Why can’t the OSVM be a single, unforked, maxed-out VM with all the best and fastest features working in Squeak and Pharo?   Why did the split happen?
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In very general terms, the fork was due to their being Group A
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wanting
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to go one direction and Group B wanting to go in a different direction. i.e....
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B says "We want to do X".
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A says "We don't want to do X."
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B says "We really want to do X."
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A says "Definitely no."
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B says "We really want to do X and actually we're doing it over here."
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Lol  Thanks for the explanation.  That’s more or less what I thought.
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But can’t the differences be setup at config-your-environ time instead of build time, when the task is heavier and slower?
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In essence, Squeak considered backward compatibility of prime importance including the code of some applications that had become entangled in the main code base.    Pharo wanted to "clean the code" by disentangling and stripping those parts.
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I like disentangling and modularizing.   I suppose this is a universal like.
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They also wanted to move to a reproducible-build-system where each
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change "bootstrapped" a nightly image from an empty file,
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I like this too.
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whereas Squeak continues to use a "continuous evolution" model.
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Don’t both groups want the automatic building and testing the Consortium is talking about recently?
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I’m not sure I understand how “continuous evolution” works.  Sounds like there is lots of wiggle room in that idea.  Don’t we need some structure?  We seem to be getting that in Pharo.
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I’m not sure about Squeak.  The GUI tools/menus still feel hodgepodge (much nicer, but still not well organized) 16 years later.  I used it between 2002 to 2004, and then again just a few days ago.  I like the faster debugger and the flat GUIs, but I don’t need Morphic to have those dev-tool GUIs.  I’d prefer to rework the GUIs with Spec2/GTK3, and keep the flat, clean, button-packed look with some improvements (like the new Spec2 selection highlighting pattern, which is very nice).  The rest of Squeak seems messy.
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I do very much like the technical, concrete feel of Squeak’s details about the VM.  That reminds me of old times and why I got involved in computers, and it supports my current interest in VM parallelization.  Those VM details need a somewhat different shape/presentation.  There is a beauty in Squeak, but the eviron still feels a bit rough.
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For example, why aren’t all those preferences in a tree where you can actually find things because they are categorized.  It’s a big list.  That seems very strange in 2020.  Why don’t Squeak folks borrow the Pharo Settings GUI idea, and implement that in Morphic, as they like?  I thought more would have happened in the Squeak GUI in 16 years, but I’ve not seen all of 5.3 yet.  I’m still poking around.  I suppose most of the improvements are in the VM, which I imagine absorbs most of the group’s energy.
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And there are more reasons I probably not aware of.
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Here is the Pharo Vision document circa 2012 which inspired me
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https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01879346/document https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01879346/document
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Thank you.  I will read it.   Is the Consortium updating that doc?  There was a doc recently from Stef that looks like it belongs in there, merged somehow.
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It looks like a bad use of energy in a community that is small and needs to use its human resources efficiently.
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Trying to go one way and dealing with continual pushback and conflict around that is also bad energy.
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Agreed.  I don’t understand the pushback because I don’t understand Squeak folks’ objection to rigorous, systematic, automatic testing and disentangling/modularizing of frameworks.  They are probably fine with all that.  Do Squeak folks have a document that defines “continuous development.”  I know that VM testing is automated.  I don’t see how the objectives are so different, at least on the automation front.  Everyone seems to agree that CI is good.
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I want to help, but need to port first from VW, and I’m trying to choose Squeak or Pharo.  Both have speed problems.  Squeak has fewer, but Pharo could be much faster with broad use of Spec2.
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Would reintegrating Squeak and Pharo development make more sense?
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I think that is not likely.  Both continue to have different goals.  And a significant area where they are likely to continue to diverge is the graphics.  Squeak is likely(?) to stay with Morphic a long while Pharo intends to dump Morphic.
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I never liked the halo thing.  It’s okay.  It seemed/seems too busy and distracting.  I think Morphic and the “too many cooks” problem is why I broke off in 2004.
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If we are fully modular, and you love Morphic, and want to live there mentally and visually, all the time, then load the Morphic package into the new universal OpenSmalltalk.  Have all your GUIs built with Morphic.  Have cute little morphs stuck here and there.  Knock yourself out.  Don’t like Morphic?  Don’t think it’s cute?  Load the more business-like-but-not-boring Spec2.  I don’t see an insurmountable technical problem here.
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This is one of the reasons that Spec was created - to be independence layer.
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IIUC in Pharo 9 Spec is already working on top of a GTK3 backend.
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Yes, the Spec2 Launcher is inspiringly snappy, modulo the text-selection slowness problem, which is everywhere in Pharo and Squeak.  I’ve mentioned this a few times recently—of all the goofy things to prevent a port from VW…..Okay, that and Pharo’s slow debugger.  Two things keep me out of Pharo/Squeak.  I don’t love VW.   I tolerate it really well.  That’s different.  J
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wrt the VM, Pharo want to remove all native-windowing from the VM,
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so
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that window opening
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is controlled from the Image via FFI rather than the VM.
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I agree with the objective.
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This conflicts with Squeak's backward comparability goals.
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Okay, this is the real problem.
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So there is a ton of old Squeak code that no one is willing to rework in order to be compatible with the new vision for native-windowing independence.  Perhaps someone can give more details on that old code.
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I suppose many Squeak folks bemoan all the extra work needed for a recoding.  Is this still really an issue?  Maybe very little of that old code is still being used in business-critical ways.  The need for a recoding may not be the big issue it once was.
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This change would effectively create more devs willing to work on any problem.  This change would also prevent fracturing of feature-sets across the two Smalltalks from happening in the first place.
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I personally had the inspiration that Squeak might be based off the
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Pharo Headless Bootstrap,
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but in the end I didn't find the time to push this further.
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That’s a very good idea.  Why don’t all the Squeak folks work on it?  Are you the only one pushing for this?
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Squeak and Pharo GUI styles are different.  So be it.  Can’t the GUI frameworks and conventions be separated in the same image, and configured as desired in GUI sections of Settings?
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Pharo currently can use both Morphic and GTK3 for its GUI backend.
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Possibly the GTK3 backend would provide some speed benefit (??)
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It’s a good question.  Is the core Morphic issue whether GTK3 can render non-rectangular shapes efficiently?  There’s a lot of that in Morphic.  I suppose it’s the main concern.  Even if Morphic relies on special drawing primitives, they can go in a lib and be accessed via FFI.
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Shaping
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