On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
[snip]
> As for what "probably" can be done, a proof by demonstration would be mighty
> nice.
> 
> 	With Morphic and a few other yummies you should be able to stay under
> 	2.5 or so.
> 	
> Ditto.

The key trick is *what* don't you want broken in such images. For example,
the final beta of ComSwiki was in a somewhat shrunk image (but included
Morphic) (hmm. I can't find my copy offhand, so I can't quickly report the
size). It worked! Mostly. Turned out that email notification broke because
of a method stripped from SMTPSocket. And I couldn't get folks to fix it
by httpFileIn: stuff, because *that* didn't work.

OTOH, the system seemed usable, even for Swiki use. No question that you'd
have to mess around with it to make sure it could do what you wanted.


> 	> It would be interesting to know roughly where the space is going.
> [by topics]
> 
> 	Hmm. I'm surprised at that. Scamper (for many things) is pretty nippy for
> 	me. 
> 
> Ah, but *my* machines are only about 250MHz.

Hmm. My machines are 300, 225, and 60. The reason I raised it is that I
was wondering *which bits* were slow. I suspect sockets stuff, but Scamper
also tried to do things in the background, so there may be some weird
interactions. (I've found *rendering* reasonable pages to be pretty
quick.)

If picture laden pages are the problem, then you may want to peek at:

	http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1680

(Scamper Tweaks)

> 	But here's a tip to help figure some of this out. SystemDictionary has a
> 	few useful space analysis tools in the miscellaneous protocol,
> 	especially #spaceTally. From it's comment:
> 	
> Yeah, I know about that.  But "topic" ~= "class".
> Even "topic" != "class category".

Yes, I know :) I demonstrate this knowledge below ;)

[snip]
> The trick is knowing *which* categories to include.

Yes, which is why I didn't stop at mentioning #spaceTally, but went on to
try to get some numbers for your topics. Just by way of trying to shed
light. Be helpful. Add documentation.

> If there were good *documentation* for the HTML parsing and formatting stuff,
> I would have a use for it, and would be able to contribute to its development.

The Networking Squeak chapter in Mark and Kim's Excellent Anthology, due
out soon, downloadable (I believe) has a *little* about this (I wanted
more but there were space limitations, perhaps when the companion site
gets going I'll add stuff). IIRC, I did try to, in one section, give a
global overview of the networking stuff and how the categories fit
together. The Scamper Tweaks page was where I started jotting such notes
down (and the Cool Celeste Filters
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1671) is another).

> What one considers "bloat" depends on what one _can_ use or not
> because of the presence of adequate or inadequate documentation as
> well as what one would find useful.

Well, I think we're back to competing definition of "bloat", or rather
"bloat" vs. "bloat for me". That's fine. I'll note that I can figure out
many bits of the system without to much documentation. I'm not saying that
one *ought* to have to do that, but just to provide encouragement. I'm
hardly a Smalltalk, Squeak, or programming guru.
 
> 	Now, testing for beginsWith: 'Morphic' gets us:
> 	
> 		 3379693
> 	
> 	Bloat at last!!!
> 	
> Except that now I've seen some decent tutorials, Morphic is no longer
> bloat *for me*.

It was a joke!!!! ;)

There's good Morphic stuff in the anthology, so we'll have hard copy stuff
soon. (June, I think.)

>  Documentation, documentation, documentation!

Yes, many are working on that. Everyone knows it. It's just *a lot* of
work work work :) And little or no funding.

> 	> Is _any_ Smalltalk dialect used for such
> 	applications [i.e., shell scripts and cgis--ed]?  I suppose
> 	> GNU Smalltalk or Budd's Little Smalltalk might be usable.
> 	
> 	SmallScript is certainly targeted to those applications (among
> 	others). Quick start up and dynamic loading are big features (it doesn't
> 	store an image, but always reconstitutes one from files).
> 	
> Never heard of it before.  Where do I find out more?

http://www.qks.com/esug/SmallScript%20and%20the%20.NET%20Platform_files/
	frame.htm

(Eek, whatever generates those slides makes sites as painful as that url.)

Is one place. Try searching comp.lang.smalltalk for posts by David
Simmons. He's been posting a lot.

He gave that talk at CampSmalltalk 2, so John's trip reports should have
stuff on it.

Note that it's not out yet, but seems to be closing in on a public
beta. It's *not* .NET limited, athough a lot of the talk deals with .NET

SmallScript and the AgentsObjectPlatform look to be very good. Lots of
interesting langauge extensions (multimethods, alternative syntaxes,
etc.) and loads of neat vm tech.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.