Nice to see Sista finally seeing the light of the day. Hope it will be available Pharo as well, by the next release. That's awesome!
This requires new bytecodes, like unchecked fast primitive calls, so that sista can have Cog generate better binaries.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280793584_A_bytecod...
For those unaware, Squeak linage descends directly from the last Xerox Smalltalk-80 images before being bootstraped.
There are two zombie processes (OID 6662 and 19ba). There are also a couple of BlockContext and MethodContext which have a nil sender and a reference to an unknown method, but which are still referenced from somewhere (i.e. the collection is prevented, even with mark & sweep). E.g. OID 79a2 of class BinaryChoice. I have a full list if anybody is interested.
Also check out https://Squeak.slack.com for a nice discussion group.
> This is the first Squeak that supports high-resolution displays on all major platforms and offers a flexible UI scale factor through improved support for TrueType fonts.
The fact that Emacs has been in use (for decades) as a tool aimed at primarily solving everyday problems, means that it's been optimized for practicality to a ridiculous extent. That's not the case with Squeak, since it still has a very strong academic/research focus and a much smaller userbase than Emacs.
That's not to say that Squeak is useless, I'm a hardcore Emacs user and I do use Squeak too, but it's nowhere near as practical. It does however offer by far the best environment to experiment with Smalltalk and image-based development.
On the other hand, I don't recommend Pharo, as I found it even less practical than Squeak with frequent braking changes and a -seemingly- complete lack of focus that has pulled the project in widely different directions over the years. At least, Squeak is cohesive and hasn't broken with Alan Kay's vision.
Nonsense! Pharo's focus is to make writing Pharo more Pharo and easier for Pharo users. Mind, if your app isn't a Smalltalk VM and IDE, then, yea, it's full of tumult and turmoil. Aren't they on their 3rd or 4th GUI toolkit rewrite now? I mean, credit where credit is due, they eat their own dog food to be sure, but as a meal, that's just not as inviting to others.
> At least, Squeak is cohesive and hasn't broken with Alan Kay's vision.
He shipped enterprise code this way. Implementation language was Perl.
I feel that every time I reach for the mouse a kitten dies in some distant universe far far away.
With Emacs I am less concerned with editing than managing my work related data and work flow, and still think Smalltalk is better for it. I see myself getting back to Smalltalk after I get some more experience with Emacs.
Both Emacs and Smalltalk though are in serious need of native SQL or some kind of good database support not for applications but managing the workspace itself. You can only get so far with plists, collections, hash tables and what nots.
Even the org-roam guys have switched to SQLite to manage the data.
It certainly seems possible and could potentially make for a great IDE foundation, I just haven't seen it done, other than the Glamorous Toolkit - https://gtoolkit.com
I'm glad that Squeak continues to embrace the Smalltalk name, community, and history - and doesn't take the Pharo approach of trying to pretend that they aren't Smalltalk.
A couple of years ago, we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint. -- Alan KayWhile the goal of Pharo is to encourage research even while breaking compatibility (possibly making it not Smalltalk at some point in the future), Squeak is way more conservative. The various SqueakFest events that happened were actually mostly about EToys used by children and teachers and at least some in the Squeak community have keeping that running a priority.
Personally I do use Squeak to research future languages as Alan intended, and it is also a great tool for that.
That used-to-be my feeling too.
Now I have more appreciation of the amount of archaic baggage that is dragged into discussion once the label Smalltalk is attached :-)