3 ms·

I used to be a Smalltalk developer on Windows 3.1 for a brief time in the early 90's. When I found out that internally, Smalltalk was compiled into a sort of i

I used to be a Smalltalk developer on Windows 3.1 for a brief time in the early 90's. When I found out that internally, Smalltalk was compiled into a sort of intermediate assembly language, and run on a virtual machine, I wondered why couldn't we just distribute the assembly language part over the Internet, where it could be run on any kind of machine with an interepreter. Everyone told me I was crazy, it was impractical, it would never work.

ioquatix 8y ago
You are crazy, it is impractical, it will never work. /s
stcredzero 8y ago
I used to work for a Smalltalk vendor. It was even better than that. For awhile we had the hottest JIT virtual machine. Smalltalks that followed the original design ran bit identically across multiple platforms. At one point, Squeak Smalltalk was running bit identically across 50 combinations of CPU and OS, and Squeak and its descendants probably can run bit identically across several times that number of environments now. But it gets even crazier. (Non-Smalltalk) In the 90's, there was an OS entirely written in a virtual Instruction Set (TAOS) which was JIT assembled into real machine code as fast as it could be read off of disk and ran at 80-90% of native speeds. This OS could be ported by simply porting the assembler, which typically took about 3 days. Back to Smalltalk craziness. There were also in-house research versions of Smalltalk that could prune their images as small as 45k, and were suitable for creating command line tool executables. As it was, VisualWorks, if you turned off things like the splash screen, actually could start faster than the Perl runtime in the late 90's, though you'd be hard pressed to create an image below 500kB. (Even getting it below a megabyte was an incredible feat.) The tech industry could be way ahead of where it is now, if only everyone were like early adopters. The thing is, most people are quite different.
- FridgeSeal 8y ago
  Wow that sounds super, super cool! As you say, I really wish tech had followed that route, think of all the cool things we'd have.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Picture it. Now, go and build it on top of what we have today!
nickpsecurity 8y ago
Juice was close to that: http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm It's one of those alternate histories for Web development I wish took off.

ioquatix 8y ago

You are crazy, it is impractical, it will never work. /s

stcredzero 8y ago

I used to work for a Smalltalk vendor. It was even better than that. For awhile we had the hottest JIT virtual machine. Smalltalks that followed the original design ran bit identically across multiple platforms. At one point, Squeak Smalltalk was running bit identically across 50 combinations of CPU and OS, and Squeak and its descendants probably can run bit identically across several times that number of environments now. But it gets even crazier. (Non-Smalltalk) In the 90's, there was an OS entirely written in a virtual Instruction Set (TAOS) which was JIT assembled into real machine code as fast as it could be read off of disk and ran at 80-90% of native speeds. This OS could be ported by simply porting the assembler, which typically took about 3 days. Back to Smalltalk craziness. There were also in-house research versions of Smalltalk that could prune their images as small as 45k, and were suitable for creating command line tool executables. As it was, VisualWorks, if you turned off things like the splash screen, actually could start faster than the Perl runtime in the late 90's, though you'd be hard pressed to create an image below 500kB. (Even getting it below a megabyte was an incredible feat.) The tech industry could be way ahead of where it is now, if only everyone were like early adopters. The thing is, most people are quite different.

FridgeSeal 8y ago
Wow that sounds super, super cool! As you say, I really wish tech had followed that route, think of all the cool things we'd have.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Picture it. Now, go and build it on top of what we have today!

nickpsecurity 8y ago

Juice was close to that: http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm It's one of those alternate histories for Web development I wish took off.