Smalltalk Zoo not written in Smalltalk

Hi all,

just a short and curious questions, but not guaranteed to be completely unprovoking. :-) Why is Smalltalk Zoo, the virtual exhibition which compares different milestones in the history of Squeak/Smalltalk, not implemented in Smalltalk itself but in JavaScript, a language which cannot compile itself, is quite the oppposite of Smalltalk in terms of clearness of expression, and escapes control of the actual application? While I love the idea in general, I think it's a shame that the zoo of a language that aims to be implemented in itself is not implemented in that language itself. :D

Is it time to make OSVM ready for webasm? Excited to hear your thoughts ...

Best,

Christoph

Am 25.04.2021 20:41:17 schrieb Thiede, Christoph <[hidden email]>:

Hi all,

just a short and curious questions, but not guaranteed to be completely unprovoking. :-) Why is Smalltalk Zoo, the virtual exhibition which compares different milestones in the history of Squeak/Smalltalk, not implemented in Smalltalk itself but in JavaScript, a language which cannot compile itself, is quite the oppposite of Smalltalk in terms of clearness of expression, and escapes control of the actual application? While I love the idea in general, I think it's a shame that the zoo of a language that aims to be implemented in itself is not implemented in that language itself. :D

Is it time to make OSVM ready for webasm? Excited to hear your thoughts ...

Best,

Christoph

Hi Marcel,

mainly because of its speed, I guess. I don't think that we could simulate older Squeak VMs inside SqueakJS. In general, I think the idea is cool, but wouldn't webasm be significantly faster?

Best,

Christoph

Am 26.04.2021 13:24:00 schrieb Thiede, Christoph <[hidden email]>:

Hi Marcel,

mainly because of its speed, I guess. I don't think that we could simulate older Squeak VMs inside SqueakJS. In general, I think the idea is cool, but wouldn't webasm be significantly faster?

Best,

Christoph

---

Von: Squeak-dev <[hidden email]> im Auftrag von Taeumel, Marcel
Gesendet: Montag, 26. April 2021 08:34:56
An: squeak-dev
Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Smalltalk Zoo not written in Smalltalk

 

Hi Christoph.

> Is it time to make OSVM ready for webasm? Excited to hear your thoughts ...

Why is SqueakJS (https://squeak.js.org/) not what you are looking for?

Best,

Marcel

Am 25.04.2021 20:41:17 schrieb Thiede, Christoph <[hidden email]>:

Hi all,

just a short and curious questions, but not guaranteed to be completely unprovoking. :-) Why is Smalltalk Zoo, the virtual exhibition which compares different milestones in the history of Squeak/Smalltalk, not implemented in Smalltalk itself but in JavaScript, a language which cannot compile itself, is quite the oppposite of Smalltalk in terms of clearness of expression, and escapes control of the actual application? While I love the idea in general, I think it's a shame that the zoo of a language that aims to be implemented in itself is not implemented in that language itself. :D

Is it time to make OSVM ready for webasm? Excited to hear your thoughts ...

Best,

Christoph

Hi Marcel,

if the Smalltalk Zoo was running inside SqueakJS, I would imagine to run all the single image examples of former Squeak/Smalltalk versions inside SqueakJS in a nested fashion. At least this would be necessary if users should be able to inspect and play with the implementations of these historic VM versions. At the moment, this might be possible by browsing the JavaScript implementation using Lively, but for Smalltalk VMs, I would prefer to browse the original Smalltalk/Slang implementations of the VM! 🤓

If we did this in the regular OSVM, -- I guess -- we could simulate these VMs using VMMaker (but I did not try it out yet. Is it fast enough?). Given the current limitations of SqueakJS, I doubt that it would be able to support the VMMaker simulator in a satisfying speed.

Thank you for the reference to the publication, I already had skimmed it a few months ago, interesting lecture. :-)

Best,

Christoph