Strongtalk VM for Squeak

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Mon Sep 25 22:19:45 UTC 2006


Dan,

I am glad to see you and so many others excited about the possibilities
that the Strongtalk release brings. The ideas you propose are very good
too. So I hate to be the "been there, done that" pessimist and hope that
what I write below will just encourage reflection but not cause anybody
to give up.

In my experience projects tend to have personalities just as people do
and tend to attract some kinds of people more than others. So while
there is no technical reason why somebody couldn't write eToys in Python
I will be very surprised if it happens, just like I don't really expect
to see Squeak become a great Unix scripting environment or embrace
native GUI widgets. These things are all possible but they would depend
on having people working on such projects who are naturally attracted to
different kinds of projects.

Of course you can pay somebody to work on something that they might not
seek out on their own, or if you are their thesis advisor you can also
get them to do it. My impression is that Craig Chambers and Urs Hölzle
were more C++ guys than Smalltalk ones even though they did such
fabulous work on the Self VM. This is based on things they said while
doing the work, the feeling I get while reading their code and also the
direction their carreers went after that project.

The source for the Self VM has been available since 1992. Perhaps the
timing was wrong (people used to complain about having to upgrade their
Sparcstations from 8MB to 24MB of RAM to run Self) and perhaps now
different people are looking into this and will make it work. But my
guess is that most people who enjoy Squeak will find the Strongtalk
sources tiring and will end up moving on to other projects. I will note
that Klein, the Self-in-Self, has also been open sourced and though I
haven't looked at it yet I expect it will be far friendlier to
Smalltalkers. Even Ian seems to have grown tired of the C world
otherwise he would have been my best bet for making something
interesting with Strongtalk.

For those Squeakers who do feel they can deal with the pain of a huge
C++ system given the rewards that await them I can just say "you have my
admiration and my thanks!"

-- Jecel



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