7 ms·

Smalltalk on Mobile (2017)

47 points by deepaksurti 8y ago

ngcc_hk 8y ago
Pointless in the sense it is just a game in a proprietary development Env which may be Smalltalk and cannot be extended. What we to do. Play the game ?
- klez 8y ago
  It's at least interesting from a technical point of view that this is possible at all. Who knows, maybe it will inspire someone to make a free implementation.
steveeq1 8y ago
Too bad he's not releasing code for the smalltalk VM. I would LOVE to program for cell phones using smalltalk. The whole pharo VM is like 60 megabytes or something insanely low.
- stewbrew 8y ago
  The VM is VisualWorks, a commercial? product.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    The development VM is VW, for deployment on mobile he uses a custom VM. He also uses a completely separate custom class hierarchy.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vanderZwan 8y ago
How difficult is it to write a VM for Smalltalk? Assume no little to no optimisations for simplicity's sake.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Not that hard, the Blue Book last chapters are a description on how to implement a VM. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html You can make use of a reference counting with cycle collector as basic GC implementation, without any JIT, for example.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    I kind of figured, given the elegance and simplicity of the language we are talking about. When you say "the Blue Book", do you mean Inside Smalltalk: Volume I?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      No, I mean "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation". The Xerox PARC books about Smalltalk-80 are known by their cover colors, green, red and blue.
- wslh 8y ago
  Look at A JIT Smalltalk VM implemented in itself [1]. [1] http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit-Jit http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit-Jit
- i_don_t_know 8y ago
  Timothy Budd's Little Smalltalk book and implementation explain how to write such a VM. You can find a copy of the book at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html You can also google for the various version of the system. System 1 is the one described in the book. System 4 consist of a very simple VM in C that implements only the byte code interpreter, memory management and garbage collection. Everything else is implemented in Smalltalk itself, including the compiler. The system is considerably smaller and easier to understand than a full Smalltalk 80 system. System 4 appears to be archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20071005062021/http://www.littlesmalltalk.org/index.php?page=version-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20071005062021/http://www.little...
gok 8y ago
See also Objective-Smalltalk [1] which is ahead of time compiled and uses the ObjC runtime. [1] http://objective.st/ http://objective.st/

47 points by deepaksurti 8y ago

Pointless in the sense it is just a game in a proprietary development Env which may be Smalltalk and cannot be extended. What we to do. Play the game ?

klez 8y ago
It's at least interesting from a technical point of view that this is possible at all. Who knows, maybe it will inspire someone to make a free implementation.

steveeq1 8y ago

Too bad he's not releasing code for the smalltalk VM. I would LOVE to program for cell phones using smalltalk. The whole pharo VM is like 60 megabytes or something insanely low.

stewbrew 8y ago
The VM is VisualWorks, a commercial? product.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  The development VM is VW, for deployment on mobile he uses a custom VM. He also uses a completely separate custom class hierarchy.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

vanderZwan 8y ago

How difficult is it to write a VM for Smalltalk? Assume no little to no optimisations for simplicity's sake.

pjmlp 8y ago
Not that hard, the Blue Book last chapters are a description on how to implement a VM. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html You can make use of a reference counting with cycle collector as basic GC implementation, without any JIT, for example.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I kind of figured, given the elegance and simplicity of the language we are talking about. When you say "the Blue Book", do you mean Inside Smalltalk: Volume I?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    No, I mean "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation". The Xerox PARC books about Smalltalk-80 are known by their cover colors, green, red and blue.
wslh 8y ago
Look at A JIT Smalltalk VM implemented in itself [1]. [1] http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit-Jit http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit-Jit
i_don_t_know 8y ago
Timothy Budd's Little Smalltalk book and implementation explain how to write such a VM. You can find a copy of the book at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html You can also google for the various version of the system. System 1 is the one described in the book. System 4 consist of a very simple VM in C that implements only the byte code interpreter, memory management and garbage collection. Everything else is implemented in Smalltalk itself, including the compiler. The system is considerably smaller and easier to understand than a full Smalltalk 80 system. System 4 appears to be archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20071005062021/http://www.littlesmalltalk.org/index.php?page=version-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20071005062021/http://www.little...

gok 8y ago

See also Objective-Smalltalk [1] which is ahead of time compiled and uses the ObjC runtime. [1] http://objective.st/ http://objective.st/