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Spry Here Goes Nothing!
(published and finished 2026-10-14)
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Spry Error Handling
Work on Spry continues… in small spurts. :) One thing that I have pushed ahead of me for far too long is error handling. People interested in Spry have been asking about it and yes, I decided to start getting a handle on it.
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Revisiting Spry
After a period of slower progress I got reignited regarding Spry. So far I have written a lot of articles about Spry, and during this time things have evolved and changed.
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Benchmarking Spry vs Squeak
Spry is evolving quite nicely during my night hours. Focusing on performance is however still premature, but I do want to verify that I am not barking up the wrong tree, like … in the wrong forest even. So I make trivial benchmarks from time to time, just to see and learn.
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Spry Performance
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!
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Spry vs Allen
Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote down a bullet list of what he thought actually made it possible for the Alan Kay team to create Smalltalk, and many other ground breaking things, at Xerox PARC in the 70s. Let’s take a look at his bullets one by one and see how it applies to Spry and my puny little effort around it :)
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Spry Modules, part II
In the last article I outlined a simple model of modules and that is kinda implemented but needs a few fixes. The next step is how to find and combine modules and this is an area where I want to push the envelope a bit. Most popular package/module systems today are quite trivial in nature. Often it’s a command line tool that queries central catalog(s) and then proceeds by downloading code in the form of source files onto disk. Then the compiler or runtime environment finds and loads the code by simply looking for files on disk. There are several parts of this that are very primitive.
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Spry Modules
As discussed in the previous article I want Spry to have a trivially accessible persistence mechanism enabling something similar to the Smalltalk image model, but based on a database. The memory organisation in Spry is basically nested Maps. After dwelling a bit on the inevitable hard question about modules and namespaces I have decided on a design that I hope will turn out simple and reasonably powerful!
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Spry image model
In developing Spry - renamed from Ni - I am getting closer to the Really Fun Stuff.