On Jun 25, 2004, at 5:39 PM, Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM wrote:

>
> Hi Avi,
>
> Ambrai Smalltalk has been in development for a LONG time (since about 
> 1998 if I remember correctly).  It is the work of only two guys with 
> more or less, one working mostly on VM type things and both working on 
> image side stuff.  They gave a presentation/demonstration at the 
> Ottawa-Carleton Smalltalk Users Group last fall.  I believe it's long 
> history is why it is carbon and not cocoa.  I think they already had a 
> lot of code written pre-OS X.

Ok, that would explain it.  It's still a shame.

> One thing that bothered me about it is that native UI widgets don't 
> get garbage collected - you have to manage that yourself.  From what 
> they said at the presentation this is fairly common with native UI's. 
>  Most of my experience is with Smalltalk/V (pre-Windows) and Squeak, 
> so I haven't really seen how others deal with this.

Using Cocoa from Squeak through the ObjC bridge, the native widgets do 
get GCd.  Memory management is definitely another reason to prefer 
Cocoa to Carbon.

> In any case, it's quite an impressive piece of work for only two guys.

Indeed!

Avi