[Newbies] Multi user Squeak image via Croquet

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 1:14 PM Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com>
wrote:

> Yoshiki Ohshima wrote on Tue, 2 Aug 2022 10:53:17 -0700
> > (I am working on a few croquet.io projects.)
>
> Great!
>
> > Trying to run the current way of how Squeak works and making
> > it "croquetified" has some challenges. One is that a Squeak image
> > typically uses 50MB, 100MB, or more memory, and that means
> > that the "snapshots" that Croquet takes and sends over the network
> > now and then can be quite expensive.
>
> The image for Croquet 0.2 (2005) was 16MB and that had a lot of content
> like textures and pictures in it, but you have a good point.
>

Well, but an elaborated avatar alone can be bigger than 16MB; so yes, the
landscape has changed a bit.

>
> > (At the same time, as we know, most of the contents in an image is
> > read only; we can imagine to have a different image structure
> > where the read only part is separate and only the new stuff is
> exchanged.)
>
> Yes, just like the idea of separating the sources into two files
> (.sources and .changes) is to avoid having the same things stored over
> and over on disk or copied over the network.
>
> Smalltalk/V had such a separation where the bulk of the image was in
> read-only .dll files while the small v.exe file only had what you
> created yourself. So it is certainly possible.
>

And there are many others who would chime in to say that "Oh, I did that a
copy on write Smalltalk thingy"^^;

>
> > Another issue is to ensure determinism. There may not be too many
> > issues around it, as the old Squeak based Croquet has shown; but the
> > current Morphic itself probably does not work out of the box in this
> regard.
>
> I have not tried Croquet in a recent Squeak image, but I am not aware of
> any problems.
>

Another thing, besides transcendental functions, is that a whileTrue: kind
of loop needs to break away at the same logical time, and Cmd-. by one
person would break out at the same time, etc.


> > An alternative approach is to have a different execution engine, or a
> translator
> > from Smalltalk to JavaScript. I actually gave a talk recently on that
> idea (and
> > other things):
> > https://youtu.be/E3og3l5kKes?t=1353
> >
> > If you enable English subtitles on YouTube, you can get the gist of what
> I was
> > talking about. The implementation of it is available here:
> > https://github.com/yoshikiohshima/smallroom
>
> Thanks for the links! I have been watching the videos for the talks from
> "Camp Smalltalk Supreme" last month in Canada and the idea of
> "transpiling" Smalltalk to Javascript seems to be very popular.
>
> That said, given that there is already one Croquet implementation in
> Squeak it seems that fixing any problems with that would be a lot less
> work than dealing with Javascript.
>

I am happy to see if somebody tries to do the full Squeak image based
environment that can do collaborative development  and all that, but
looking at the old Croquet architecture without having a real model view
separation sounds very hard to me, unfortunately.


>
> > On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 5:30 AM Jiri R. wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > The is croquet.io which allows "multiple users to work or play together
> within
> > a single shared distributed environment". I wonder whether it is
> possible to take
> > a squeak image and make it that single shared distributed environment. So
> > multiple users would have some sort of UI (with system browser,
> workspaces, ..)
> > and be able to work on a single underlining model (the squeak image).
>
> The current croquet.io is a new implementation in Javascript of the
> ideas for the old Croquet project in Squeak from 2003, which was forked
> as the academic OpenCobalt, the commercial Qwaq/Terf and the current
> commercial 3DICC.
>
> An older project called Nebraska used a different approach to allow
> people on different computers to work together on Squeak projects. There
> was another project from Japan similar to Nebraska that was very
> interesting but I can't remember its name, unfortunately.
>
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2901
>
> http://www.opencobalt.net/
>
> https://www.3dicc.com/
>
> https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356
>
> -- Jecel
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>


-- 
-- Yoshiki
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/attachments/20220802/b11e9a11/attachment-0001.html>