[UI] Re: Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Bill Schwab schrieb:
> Andreas,
>
> Some random thoughts:
>
> The standard (and not altogether unreasonable) answer to "no support for
> x on y" is "Want FFI on Solaris? Write it."  You are correct in pointing
>   
I know this, alas this is not so easy as it sounds. FFI uses libffi. And 
libffi is now a part of
gcc. It seems as if I had to tame that beast and some other dependencies 
first.

> out the deficiencies; "they" are correct in pointing out that "we" could
> help more.  Sadly, I suspect many would help more if help were more
> aggressively accepted.
>
> I accept some blame for failing to make it easier to write certain apps.
>  I really should put an MVP wrapper around some of the morphic chaos. 
> Various things have distracted me, including learning more about Linux -
> Squeak is of dubious value to me if I stay on Windows, hence the
>   
I once was a big Linux fan. That changed when I realized that there is 
no such thing like
"Linux the operating system". There is "Linux the kernel" that is used 
by different companies
and organizations to build their own Linux based operating systems.
But they are free to add/patch/remove things to the Linux kernel and 
combine this with any
kind or version of X11, KDE, GNOME, ... and so on. This is a support 
nightmare for a software
creator. Sooner or later one recognizes a new kind of dependency hell.
This was the major motivation for me to choose Solaris. Alas with 
Solaris you have to fight the
Linuxisms and GNUisms because everybody expects the C compiler to be gcc 
and most other GNU
tools in the tool chain.

> diversion.  Ubuntu installs quite easily, though an upgrade to 7.10
> fried my VPN (getting to be a pain) and added/revealed some largely
> cosmetic bugs.  I also want to get craftier with shell scripts.  I am
> starting to think fondly of "reinstall, run custom script, return to
> find re-configured machine."  Come to think of it, I want the same thing
> for Squeak, getting the latest version of various things (Gary's work
> being high on the list) w/o having to click and wait my way through a
> GUI.  No lack of gratitude implied; the GUIs are great, but sometimes a
> script is the better way to go.
>
> I also looked at ST/X, and found pretty much what you did.  It has
> strong supporters, but early experiments left me concerned that it would
> fail a lot too easily for my taste and needs.  
>
> Re Squeak's GUI speed, have you tried some older versions?  IIRC, Squeak
> took a real speed hit somewhere around 3.8 or 3.9????  That's not to say
> "downgrade or suck it up," but I _am_ curious if older versions are
> faster.  One nice thing about slow platforms is that slow code crawls
> all the more on them. 
>   
Of course I have. And in fact the older versions feel more responsive. 
But older versions lack
some things that were introduced in 3.9 and 3.10. And older versions 
look more terrible than
3.9 or 3.10 for me. Furthermore I have the feeling that you have to 
follow bugs.squeak.org for
bug reports and fixes and have to patch your image on your own as most 
of the fixes are only
incorporated in the version that is actually being worked on.
> To add a concern to your list, what about incompatibilities with other
> dialects?  To continue my rant about streams,
>
>    'hello' at:200
>
> raises an error, but 'hello' readStream next:200 truncates.  Hmmmm. 
> Dolphin and VW get this one right.  Nile includes some beginning efforts
> to rewrite some methods to use its streams, but to really fix it (I
> think) requires a breaking change.  I am tempted to turn the RB loose to
> turn #next into #nextOrNil and #next into #nextAvailable: (there might
> be others I have yet to recognize), and then begin work in the new image
> after adding some methods and/or switching to Nile.  Add confusion over
> that to my list of reasons/excuses for delay in MVP ;)  Humor aside, it
> *is* a concern to me.
>
> So, what are we going to do to fix all of this stuff?
>   
Yes, this is a big concern for Smalltalkers using different Smalltalk 
dialects. You can add
non-standard GUI frameworks, sockets and nearly all things not defined 
by the ANSI standard
to this list.  But this is usually not a problem during the first 
experiments of newcomers.

Regards
Andreas