[squeak-dev] 4.2 wish list
Chris Muller
cmm at 4dst.com
Fri May 14 20:35:43 UTC 2010
4.1 was one of those great Squeak releases where there were
significant infrastructural improvements. I would like 4.2 to push
even further toward the dream of a free, industrial-grade Smalltalk
engine. A Smalltalk in which the tools a Smalltalk developer expects
to work, work, and work well. But we still have a gap to fill:
- Refactoring
- Profiling
- Efficient finalization and weak-collections
As great as 4.1 is, none of these tools are acceptably usable in 4.1,
but I have hope for them for 4.2. There has been some recent
discussion around wrapping some ToolBuilder views around the RB
engine. Andreas _seemed_ to indicate the profiling issue is not
seriously difficult to fix and, finally, I have been working with Igor
on his finalization and weak-collection fixes that I will report on
soon.
I'm also very excited about the recent interest in SqueakMap; that it
could potentially be freshened and become a "go-to" place for easy,
convenient in-image software exploration, accompanied by
documentation. And, the current HelpSystem documentation effort is
just the icing on the cake.
In summary, a free, industrial-grade Smalltalk engine, advanced
developer tools, documention and loaded with cool working demos. This
is my dream for what I would think would make a fantastic 4.2 release,
what do you think?
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