[modules] What should be the first step?

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Sun Aug 19 16:39:00 UTC 2001


--On Saturday, August 18, 2001 9:27 PM -0400 Marcio Marchini <mqm at magma.ca> 
wrote:

>> 1. A minimal kernel
>> This would be something like the 240k "tiny" image I made from
>> Squeak a few years ago (had compiler, files, minimal graphics
>> (only enough to put up a transcript), collections, strings and
>> numbers).  I would like to go farther with this by using the OS
>> for the transcript, so that all this thing can really do is read
>> in the next package.
>
>
>	 If you have a mini web server (headless) running in Squeak, I'd say the
> Smalltalk compiler and the Transcript support aren't really needed.

Perhaps, but should we really optimize for the absolute minimal case?

> You're
> not compiling new code, and you can log messages to stdout or a file. So,
> I'd say they do not belong to a minimal kernel.

Well, I disagree at *least* as far as the compiler. Dan *did* say "I would 
like to go farther with this by using the OS for the transcript, so that 
all this thing can really do is read in the next package."

Two points: yes on the "Transcript to stdout or file" but also this is a 
kernal minimal enough for bootstrapping (i.e., reading in the next package).


>	 As I said before, I like the list from PocketSmalltalk:
> http://www.pocketsmalltalk.com/whitepaper.html#builtins

Which has stuff one could remove. Minimality isn't the only goal, IMHO.

>	 The next level up would be the above with compiler support, so that you
> could maybe use this as a TTY scripting language. Still no GUI, just
> stdout.
>
>	 Then on top of that GUI, etc.

I heartily agree that *whatever* we have, it should run well headless.

That means that it should run well *without* a gui per se, but that doesn't 
mean that it needs to *not* include the GUI support. After all, you might 
want to switch headlessness on or off.

Given how *tweensy* minimal compiler/gui support is (a few ks of bytecode) 
I'm not sure I see the advantage of leaving it out, especially first round.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.






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