I wasn't finished writing but wiping the rain off the phone decided the matter for me accidentally. 

Yes, a "distributed Smalltalk" is absolutely a very interesting thing to pursue, in part because the idea behind object oriented programming was supposed to be separate async intercommunicating nodes in a network of other self similar things, but... 

Other other people have taken up this line of inquiry and produced interesting results already. Most recently, David Ungar, who's work I think we all really should be at least familiar with, has even recently explored this.

I think this is a great idea for a project, but yet again I'm not sure I can help much, beyond activating and mobilizing supporters for this kind of work. 

FWIW, I have CC'd David, on the off chance that he wants to keep exploring this category of inquiry, and if there's anything at all that I can do to help with raising funds: either with Smalltalk or with Self, I'll be damned if I don't try to put some wind in these sails. 

I must admit that I am an adoring fan of Self. Read that as you will:)

What do you think, David? Should we crowd-source funding more work on the Roar VM? Or is there something else I should be fighting for?

Casey

On Mar 8, 2013, at 2:29 AM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> Below, with my original message deleted for brevity. 
> 
> On Mar 8, 2013, at 2:20 AM, Angel Java Lopez <ajlopez2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Umm.... I don't know the "state-of-the-art" in Squeak, but one thing I implemented that it was useful for my projects (in Node.js), was something like RPC (remote procedure call), or in terms of Smalltalk, send a message to other machine, specifying the target object (by id?), selector and serialized arguments. In my case, Node.js ecosystem already had such implementations, I wrote my own to practice.
>> 
>> But if it is a relatively "brave new world" in Smalltalk/Squeak (note that you can implement a protocol, to have client/servers in different Smalltalk protocols).
>> 
>> At Smalltalks 2011 (Entre Rios, Argentina) I attended to a talk about the future of Pharo, where it was briefly mentioned Distributed Smalltalk. But I don't sure what is it, or its status.
>> 
>> I'm wrote something alike the above description, but only in my C# VM implementation:
>> http://ajlopez.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/distributed-objects-in-ajtalk/
>> 
>> My interests in distributed apps:
>> http://ajlopez.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/programming-languages-distributed-computing-and-artificial-intelligence/
>> 
>> Angel "Java" Lopez
>> @ajlopez
> 
> I really don't think Squeak is the state of the art, so we don't have to worry about that part. VPRI will probably take care of that for us in the long run. But that's a research system and we have a rock solid system NOW that we can apply to real problems. How lucky and priveledged are we? I'd say: pretty damned lucky. 

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