Tim Rowledge wrote on Wed, 23 Dec 2015 09:45:25 -0800
> I?m not a huge fan (having tried it in the past) of ?nothing but Smalltalk?
> because it?s so damn hard. All those tricky hardware drivers to futz with
> and changing hardware and ? ugh. It seems much more sensible to me
> to use a Smalltalk as the layer above a decent kernel, to add tools to do
> all the things one normally needs to do and get the benefits of both
> systems. Of course, there?s still a *staggering* amount of work to do that.

C code doesn't write itself, and is as much work to produce it as the
equivalent Smalltalk code. Of course, in practically all situations with
machines like PCs or the Raspberry Pi someone has already done the C
version but the Smalltalk version would still have to be written if
anyone were interested in it. I fully agree this is essentially
pointless. Since I am interested in new machines, the situation is a bit
different.

There is a way to do an OS in Smalltalk and still make use of existing C
code:

https://marcusdenker.de/Squeak/SqueakOS/

Unfortunately, not only is this way out of date but the FluxOS/OSKit
project on which it is based has been dead for a very long time (as far
as I know).

Anyway, isn't there an additional complication in the original Raspberry
Pi where the boot code runs on the graphics processor instead of the
ARM? The issue is which is the simplest way to get Pi users to run
Squeak? A package they can load into Raspbian with everything they need
to use the pre-installed VM? An All-In-One package? A complete SD card
image? Actual SD cards (this costs money to distribute)?

-- Jecel