johndoe0815

59 ms·

1. 751.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   The screenshots are boring - it looks like any other Smalltalk-80 system :). A picture of the setup to test one of my earliest versions can be found in my blog article (this needs to be updated) [1] and another more current one in my linked
2. 752.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   I had a quick look at the Win32 BitBlt API and it seems to be quite similar. Can you remember how much work was actually involved in mapping the Smalltalk primitives to Win32?
3. 753.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   Thanks for the link - that looks really interesting! I will have to give it a try to make some informed statement, but I think it's definitely worth looking at. Some parts of Ruby also seem to be inspired by Smalltalk, so that might be
4. 754.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   Not yet, sorry - I'm still running 32 bit Raspbian.
5. 755.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   I have already spent some money on the Pinebook Pro, so I hope that my next notebook after this will also be RISC V-based... But the MNT reform (and the Purism Librem 5, which uses a similar SoC) is a great project and an interesting platfo
6. 756.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   The PinePhone is a very interesting platform. Unfortunately, the circle library I'm using only supports Raspberry Pis so far, so porting crosstalk to the Allwinner A64 in the PinePhone (even though the processor cores are the same as i
7. 757.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   Robot control would be a fascinating applications (but my students had to program our robots in C [1] ;-)). I am not an expert in ROS, but there have been other projects using Smalltalk for robotics, such as NXTalk [2] and a Squeak-based sy
8. 758.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   Not in the current version, here the drivers are implemented in C/C++ in the circle bare-metal library [1]. In general, I think Smalltalk is not that well suited as a systems programming language since garbage collection might mess wit
9. 759.▲
   by johndoe0815 6y ago

   There's the Interim OS project [1] (already discussed in another comment here) as a bare-metal Lisp and it might be interesting to port Movitz [2], a bare-metal Lisp project for x86 that seems to be abandoned for quite some time now. T
10. 760.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Oops, good catch - thanks!
11. 761.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Btw., the biological inspiration is now in a way reversed and a huge networked cluster of ARM nodes is currently used to simulate the brain in the SpiNNaker Project [1]. This project is headed by Steve Furber at Manchester University, one o
12. 762.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    That idea crossed my mind, too - in fact, I have a SOPINE cluster here [1] (built by Pine64) that would be a good platform for experiments with distributed objects. The Turing Pi is a very similar product for Raspberry Pi Compute Modules [2
13. 763.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    It seems to be a problem with the USB controller driver in circle. Startup hangs with the message "XHCI: HW reset failed". I was under the impression that the hardware of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 was identical to the versions with l
14. 764.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    In addition to the Interim Lisp system I mentioned in another comment, there are a number of bare-metal applications for the Raspberry on github (mostly ports of games). I especially like this Commodore 64 emulator (also based on circle):
15. 765.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Great that you like it - thanks! Some of the work of Stephen R. Kell at Kent University also covers language-based OSes and how some of their ideas might be adapted in Unix (see [1] and [2]). The Smalltalk-80 VM is specified in Smalltalk it
16. 766.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    BitBlt was also used as the drawing primitive for an early graphics terminal developed at Bell Labs, the appropriately named "Blit" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) . Hardware implementa
17. 767.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    It was actually submitted twice before, but both submissions linked to the linkedin article, not directly to the github repository.
18. 768.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Btw., you can read a bit about the background of Smalltalk and the Raspberry port in my article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/relive-part-xerox-parcs-histo...
19. 769.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    One of the inspirations for my "crosstalk" Smalltalk system was Lukas Hartmann's Lisp-based "Interim OS" bare-metal system for the Raspberry ( http://interim-os.com/ ), so you might want to give this
20. 770.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Thanks for mentioning this - I would certainly appreciate input on this. Testing software on half a dozen different Raspberry Pi models currently involves quite a bit of cable un- and replugging...
21. 771.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Accelerating the Smalltalk VM BitBlt primitives using the VPU would certainly be interesting. Currently, drawing is rather slow since lots of the functionality is implemented in interpreted bytecodes and rendering to the framebuffer is comp
22. 772.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Author here - happy to answer your questions... Beware, there's a bug on ARM11-based Raspberry Pis (BCM2835 on Pi 1/Zero/Zero W and CM1) that crashes the VM when executing drawing functions. I'm currently investigating t
23. 773.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Hi, author here - happy to answer questions. This has been posted twice earlier ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23816867 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789016 ), but didn't attract an
24. 774.▲
    by johndoe0815 6y ago

    Hi, author here - happy to answer questions. Beware, the current version on github has a bug that crashes the system on a BCM2835 (ARM11-based original Raspberry Pi 1/Zero(W)/CM1) when using floating-point operations, see my comme
25. 775.▲
    Ask HN: Automated SW testing on different Raspberry Pi models?

    8 points by johndoe0815 6y ago|1 comments
26. 776.▲
    by johndoe0815 7y ago

    Iriun ( https://iriun.com/ ) works well for me on OS X with a Xiaomi Mi A2 lite running Android 9. There's also versions of the required drivers for Windows and Linux available. Used it with Skype for Business and Blackb
27. 777.▲
    by johndoe0815 7y ago

    Neither - the original article at https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v mentions relative performance in Coremarks/MHz as 4.9 and 6.3, respectively. Giving a maximum operating frequency fo
28. 778.▲
    by johndoe0815 7y ago

    For a complete SPARCstation 5 implementation able to run SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Linux or NeXTstep, see http://temlib.org/ - this fits on a Spartan6 XC6SLX45T FPGA, so you should be able to get it to work on the larger Spartan