jecel

37 ms·

181.
by jecel 4y ago
Thanks for pointing it out. Not having clicked on the link I had assumed it was about the second Byte issue that had a bunch of Smalltalk articles. Looking it up I see that that one was from 1985: https://archive.org/details
182.
by jecel 4y ago
Slang is Smalltalk-80 written as if it were C: all methods in a single class so they can be translated to C functions, no object allocations and so on. This means that you can run the code as Smalltalk-80 inside Squeak and use all the tools
183.
by jecel 4y ago
There are cheaper options than $10K (see Mosis or Europractice price tables) but they have smaller areas (to be cheaper, you can have larger chips if you pay more) and might require commercial tools and NDAs. The process options range from
184.
by jecel 4y ago
The main goal for Slang was to be able to use the Smalltalk debugger instead of something like gdb. Since you are essentially writing C but with a Smalltalk syntax the code itself is not any simpler, so it is all about the tools.
185.
by jecel 4y ago
I enjoy using stuff for things they were not created for. In my HN profile I claim to be a hacker in the old sense of the word, and this is a big part of old style hacking. But I am not then surprised when it takes a lot more effort than us
186.
by jecel 4y ago
It is great that Scratch can be used as an introduction to programming, but that is not why it was created. It was part of the MIT MediaLab "Computer Clubhouse"[1] project where it would be used to enable a remix culture of cute a
187.
by jecel 4y ago
Actually, the NeXTStep style was adopted by Windows 3.1 and that made it look subtly different from 3.0. Given the timing, I think the actual direct influence on Windows 3.1 was Motif, which in turn was inspired by NeXTStep. When the NeXT w
188.
by jecel 4y ago
The IBM guys had gone to Seattle expecting to license CP/M. Their "benchmark" (in business terms) was the Apple II with Microsoft's Z80 SoftCard running CP/M. As far as they could tell, Microsoft owned CP/M. Bi
189.
by jecel 4y ago
In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy fou
190.
by jecel 4y ago
I was not able to find the reference and I didn't read it carefully back then so might have misunderstood what was being proved.
191.
by jecel 4y ago
It has been a very long time since I read the book, but if I remember correctly the first message was actually found in base 11 (a picture of a circle). Back then it hadn't been decided yet if the distribution of the digits of pi are s
192.
by jecel 4y ago
Alan wanted what eventually became EToys for his Apple projects. They looked into doing it in Java but figured that digging the old Apple Smalltalk-80 out of the trash bin and cleaning it up would be less effort. So we got Squeak. Then they
193.
by jecel 4y ago
This paper compares the "blue book style" bytecodes (also known as V3 bytecodes) with the new ones used by sista: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280793584_A_bytecod...
194.
by jecel 4y ago
The idea in sista is to do all fancy optimizations in the image by translating bytecodes to different bytecodes. The VM (called Cog, in this case) just has to translate the bytecodes to native binaries on demand. This requires new bytecodes
195.
by jecel 4y ago
The title for https://squeak.org/ is "Squeak/Smalltalk"
196.
by jecel 4y ago
But that "better than Smalltalk" would not be Squeak, so I still present the system to people as "Squeak Smalltalk". While the goal of Pharo is to encourage research even while breaking compatibility (possibly making it
197.
by jecel 4y ago
While the 432 was a memory-to-memory CISC and the 960 a classic RISC, I do think they have a lot in common technically. A key difference is that the 432 uses positive/negative offsets to separate raw data and capabilities while the 960
198.
by jecel 4y ago
I would say it was intended as the main processor for supercomputers. I did a design like that (though it ended up actually built with old 68020s we already had in stock to save money) and there were many others. Intel itself had some inter
199.
by jecel 4y ago
The i860 introduced many new ideas, some that worked well and were copied and others that turned out to be unfortunate. Using wide datapaths in a single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) scheme for graphics got copied by Sparc and then
200.
by jecel 4y ago
As far as I know the i960 was the follow on to the iAPX432 (a joint venture with Siemens called BiiN) and not at all related to the i860. This led Intel to have three options for the future in early 1990s: x86, i860 and i960. They decided t
201.
by jecel 4y ago
Actually, my school has a very strict deadline and I missed it so didn't get the PhD. But there is that text and the slides of my presentation: https://prezi.com/yhw-a3i0rnri/adaptive-compilation-for-an-o... The f
202.
by jecel 4y ago
You might find some aspects of my SiliconSqueak 3 design similar to your ideas. The details for the instruction set can be found in the appendix of this 2015 text: http://www.merlintec.com/download/jecel_phd_deposited.p
203.
by jecel 4y ago
The switch was 6809 to 68000 with 8 bit bus (like the TMS9900 in the TI99/4A) to keep Raskin happy that a machine was still cheap enough with only 64KB. The goal was to share some of the Lisa software. But having a very low cost Lisa g
204.
by jecel 4y ago
In English "to compile" is defined as "produce (something, especially a list, report, or book) by assembling information collected from other sources." which seems like a good description of what A0 to A2 did. It is a pi
205.
by jecel 4y ago
And the Z80 had a 4 bit ALU. Note that the 68000 actually had three 16 bit ALUs and could crunch 48 bits per cycle, depending on what operations you were doing since one was a full ALU while the other two more simple adders/subtractors
206.
by jecel 4y ago
It also only implements 3 registers, not 16 (RV32E) or 32 (RV32I), though it might count as 4 since register 0 is hardwired to a 0 value. But using the RISC-V instructions means that all kinds of existing tools will work just fine for them
207.
by jecel 4y ago
Here is a video of a recreation of that using an actual Altair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw
208.
by jecel 4y ago
While it is nearly always true that implementing stuff in hardware doesn't help as much as software people would hope, there are interesting exceptions. The 1986 Smalltalk processor project from Canada, called Swamp, used the top two b
209.
by jecel 4y ago
The 8086 couldn't properly run C unless you were willing to limit yourself to 64KB (or three times that, if separating code, data and stack didn't hurt your application). To use the full address space you had to use non standard e
210.
by jecel 4y ago
Smalltalk (Squeak and Pharo, perhaps Cuis as well) does run on the iPhone. At least at some time in the past there were a few apps in the Apple store which had been written in Squeak. The restriction was that it had to be impossible to brea

More ›