Topic: Pharo

When writing Spry I am so far mainly ignoring performance. The general execution of Spry code will be a regular interpreter (although stackless I hope) and not a JIT. But that doesn’t prevent us from playing around and learning something!

In my exploration of Nim the turn has come to see how we can use Nim together with Squeak.

In the open source Smalltalk community we have a pretty fast VM these days - its called Cog and is written by the highly gifted and experienced Eliot Miranda who also happens to be a really nice guy! Cog is fast and its also still improving with some more developers joining recently.

As a long time Squeak/Pharo (Smalltalk) developer I have accumulated a set of packages that I have written or co-written and that have been published open source for others to use. Since quite a few years SqueakSource has been the natural hosting place, but it has reached the end of the road and it’s high time to move on.

In a customer project right now I need to be able to work and evolve code fast, with a relatively complex model. And by fast I mean that I want to cut away as much as possible of the efforts related to persistence. Generally this is what OODBs excel at.

Recently there were a range of threads on the pharo-dev mailinglist discussing the textual format to use for Smalltalk source code metadata. The discussion veered off from the specific use case but basically four different formats were discussed and compared, of which one I am the author. And oh, sorry for the formatting of this article - I need to change theme on this blog for better readability.

These days I am, as usual, torn between several interesting technical projects.

Suddenly it is Wednesday and we are already on day three at ESUG - a superb software developer conference focused on Smalltalk. Time flies. Yesterday I mainly hacked together with Nicolas Petton on Jtalk, really fun, unfortunately I missed a few interesting presentations, like Fuel and Bifrost etc.

Each year I try to attend at least one developer conference. Earlier OOPSLA was a given but it lost its appeal quite a few years back and now it is not even called OOPSLA anymore. As a die hard Smalltalker I instead attended the ESUG conference in Brest 2009 and it was easily the most rewarding conference I ever have attended! Missed last year in Barcelona but this year I am going to Edinburgh for a week of Smalltalking.

Two years ago I ended up creating Tirade - a new “file format” for Smalltalkers. Or rather, a way to serialize stuff into a sequence of Smalltalk messages with literals as arguments. I have written a few blog articles about Tirade so I will not go into details in this one.