Squeak on Roads Less Taken

Squeak to Nim, come in Nim...

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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

Squeak (and Pharo) has two basic mechanisms of interfacing with the C world:

Squeak VM plugins . That pdf is old, but still fairly accurate I guess.
Squeak FFI , Foreign Function Interface.

The VM plugins are basically a controlled way to introduce new “named” primitives in Smalltalk that can be invoked from Smalltalk. A plugin can be built either linked into the VM binary (statically) or as a dynamically loaded library (dll, so, dylib etc). When “all else fails” a plugin is the way to go, but they are a bit awkward to work with.

Then we have the FFI which is a generic way to dynamically call dynamically loaded libraries. In other words, no compilation step needed - just type the correct Smalltalk line and the library will load and the calls work. Now… sure, the FFI mechanism is a bit slower, since it needs to look at arguments and make the proper type conversions for the call. But the FFI is heavily used in the commercial Terf system, in fact, all the OpenGL calls are done through it. So its quite proven, and not that slow.

NOTE: There are in fact several FFIs today, the old one, the one called Alien and Pharo is brewing a new one called UFFI.

Let’s see if we can use the good old FFI with Nim.

Cog vs LuaJIT2

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Another very fast VM is LuaJIT2 for the Lua language (version 5.1), also written by a single individual with extraordinary programming talent - Mike Pall. LuaJIT2 is often mentioned as the fastest dynamically typed language (or VM) and even though Lua is similar to Smalltalk (well, its actually very similar to Javascript) its also clearly a different beast with other characteristics. If you start looking at the world of game development - then Lua appears everywhere.

Moving to SmalltalkHub

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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 .

Literal arrays vs JSON vs STON vs Tirade

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:11:22 +0000

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.

Current Smalltalk obsessions...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:15:10 +0000

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

Amber Link to heading

The new Smalltalk called Amber (by Nicolas Petton) that compiles to javascript is pretty awesome and there are tons of interesting things one can do with it. My contributions so far include the beginning of a package model, a faster simpler chunk format exporter/importer, a command line compiler, a Makefile system so that Amber can be built fully from the command line and a bunch of examples running on top of Nodejs and webOS , and a few other odds and ends.

ESUG day 4

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:50:52 +0000

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!

Nicolas managed to do quite a few “on the fly” demonstrations of various Jtalk snippets etc, and running the slides in Jtalk was of course a killer thing. I explained how jtalkc is being run on top of Node.js and quickly proceeded into showing the TrivialServer demo in Node.is - when Apache benchmark showed 1800 requests/second there was a spontaneous applause. :)

ESUG 2011 in Edinburgh

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:59:57 +0000

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.

Tirade, supporting embedded text

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 01:22:58 +0000

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.

One thing that has been disturbing with Tirade is that I wanted it to be the main format for serializing Deltas, the new implementation of “21st Century ChangeSets”. This means I want Tirade to handle Smalltalk source code in the best possible way. Ideally I would want the Tirade file to be editable in a text editor if I wanted, and not being broken by that.

Preaching Smalltalk inside a nuclear reactor

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:07:35 +0000

…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.

Anyway, I tried doing an ultra compact version of several of my other presentations around Smalltalk and Seaside - didn’t really go 100% since I both had some technical issues (keyboard problems and projector issues too) and ended up taking more time than was planned. Hopefully noone got upset about that.

Node.js vs Nginx/Squeak, part 1

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:55:58 +0000

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. :)

My first run on Nginx/Squeak looked quite unimpressive. Well, one client doing 1300 req/s to a small helloworld was decent although Node.js handled approximately 2x that. With Nginx we have a two tier solution so a factor of 2 is not really surprising in this trivial case. Top showed similar load, both solutions only seem to consume 8-9% of my CPU power on this box, but the Nginx/Squeak solution of course spreads load between them with approximately 1/3 or 1/4 on nginx.

Tirade, first trivial use

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:43:55 +0000

Last night I started hooking Tirade into Deltas. Quick background: Deltas is “Changesets for the 21st century”, or in other words an intelligent patch system under development for Squeak. Tirade is a Smalltalk/Squeak centric “JSON”-kinda-thingy. I made Tirade in order to get a nice file format for Deltas. Just wanted to share how the first trivial code looks, and thus illustrate simple use of Tirade.

I have a DSDelta (a Delta being almost like a ChangeSet). It consists of some metadata (a UUID, a Dictionary of properties and a TimeStamp) and a DSChangeSequence (which holds the actual DSChange instances). As a first shot I only implemented the metadata bit. So step by step:

Tirade, part 2

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:34:07 +0000

In an article recently I described Tirade - a new generic “file format” for Smalltalk/Squeak, or actually a sub language! Since that article I have refined Tirade a bit. Tirade consists today of 4 classes (parser, reader, writer, recorder) totalling about 500 lines of code, excluding tests. Tests are green in 3.10.2, pharo-10231, 3.9, 3.8 and 3.7. It does turn red in 3.6 due to old initialize behavior, some missing methods etc, probably easily fixed if anyone cares. There are no dependencies on other packages. Compared to using the old Compiler»evaluate: it is about 5-7 times faster.

Tirade, a file format for Smalltalkers

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:24:07 +0000

In my revived work on Deltastreams in Squeak I ended up facing the choice of native file format for Deltas. Matthew has made an advanced format called InterleavedChangeset which manages to squeeze a binary representation of a Delta into a Changeset file (which is in Smalltalk chunk format). An impressive feat, and it has the advantage of being backwards compatible in the sense that a Delta in this format can be filed in as a plain old Changeset into an old Squeak image.