[squeak-dev] Separating runtime from development (was: Smalltalk vs Eclipse)

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Fri Jan 22 10:54:19 UTC 2010


On 22.01.2010, at 07:40, Ralph Boland wrote:
> 
> It seems to me that when you run Smalltalk ideally you would
> run two images.  One would be the development environment image
> and the other would be the application image.  When you started
> a new project you would choose from a selection of start images
> each including some subset of the development classes you
> expect to need. There would also be a capability to copy entire
> methods/classes/applications/other from the development image to the
> application image.  

> How much of an effort would be involved in modifying some version
> of Smalltalk (say Squeak) to work this way?   (I have NO plans to do this!)
> 
> How much of a benefit would such a version of Smalltalk really be?
> 
> Has this been done before, perhaps in some other language, and what
> were the results?

It has been done, even in Smalltalk. Was it in VisualWorks, almost ready-to-ship, and killed by the infamous merger? Someone else will pipe up with the details.

Was also done in Squeak - John Maloney has code that assembles a Squeak image in memory. I hear it's not *that* hard ;) What would be hard is integrating this with the dev tools. What he does is have a separate class hierarchy in your dev image that you modify using your regular dev tools, and at deployment time, that hierarchy gets copied into the in-memory image. The result is an image smaller than 100 KB for a simple app IIRC.

I personally don't need such a facility. But then I'm mostly interested in Etoys, which is all about personal computing rather than app development.

Where I do see a need for this is cross-development for embedded systems. And that also has been done, the most recent one being NXTalk:

http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/projects/nxtalk/

- Bert -





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