Topic: Squeak

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.

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.

This day started with some stress, Nicolas and I whipped up the last details of our co-presentation on Jtalk (Nicolas decided to skip Iliad) - and my Eris demo suddenly got b0rken. But I managed to fix it and our presentation was very well received - it was great fun!

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.

…is what I did yesterday. It was the Stockholm GTUG group having a loose and laid back meetup in a rather special venue - R1, Sweden’s first nuclear reactor! 27 meters below ground, kinda… funky.

Hmmm, after seeing the Node.js presentation at Dyncon 2011 I couldn’t help installing Nginx and Blackfoot (SimpleCGI) in a Squeak 4.2 image running on the Cog VM to make some performance tests! In fact I started doing that during the presentation. :)