Seaside 3.0rc – One Click Image
23 July, 2010
Following on from the recent release of the Seaside release candidate for 3.0, a Squeak “One-Click” image has been put together to allow you to try out the new version with—er—one click!
The new image is based on Squeak 4.1, and launches fully configured with Seaside running with Comanche on port 8080, so you can immediately see the new improved Seaside welcome page at http://localhost:8080/, with links to documentation and the Seaside book.
Seaside’s 3.0 release is faster, cleaner, better tested and has many other changes and improvements over previous releases, so it’s well worth checking out this release candidate now.
Smalltalk: the past, the present, and the future?
15 July, 2010
Anyone with an interest in the continuing role and development of Smalltalk has had lots to chew on over the past few days.
As part of a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages, Computerworld Australia has published a conversation with Alan Kay about his role in the development of the “foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80″, Object-Oriented Programming, and modern software development.
InfoQ is running a series of interviews recorded at QCon London. One of these is a session with Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discussing the Future of OOP, including their take on what Smalltalk got wrong and right.
Finally, Gilad Bracha continues to lay out his vision for what he sees as Smalltalk’s successor, Newspeak. His latest post contains encouragement and advice for those interested in porting existing libraries and applications to Newspeak.
A newer, faster computer – for free!
8 July, 2010
Eliot Miranda has announced that his new Cog VM is now available for download, bringing Just-In-Time compilation and massive speed-ups to Squeak and Pharo.
If you’ve been following Eliot’s blog, you’ll know that he’s been working on this new VM for quite a few months now; well, it’s now ready for public consumption, and it’s blisteringly fast: up to three times faster than the existing VMs.
The VM selectively re-compiles code to native (Intel) machine-code, based on the size and complexity of the methods, and how often they’re called. This means that the benefits of the new VM vary from task to task, but Andreas Raab estimates that you should expect a 2-3x performance improvement generally, “more towards 2x when running primitive and I/O-bound stuff; more towards 3x when running ‘pure’ Smalltalk code”.
Eliot is interested in hearing from developers on other platforms who want to port the new VM to those platforms. In the meantime, he has also released the “Stack VM”, a cross-platform interpreter that uses context-to-stack mapping to achieve more modest performance gains.
See Eliot’s original post and the following discussion for more details of the new VM, some notes of caution, and how to get your hands on it and use it.
Thanks to Eliot for this great piece of work, and to Teleplace who have funded this work (and have been using it for the past year), and have agreed to release the new VM’s under the MIT Licence.
Calling all Smalltalkers!
2 July, 2010
Luc Fabresse invites all Smalltalkers to submit your Smalltalk based software to the 7th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the 18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.
No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted. Last year’s entries included student projects, one-man labours of love, and full commercial applications.
Don’t forget that early registrations for the conference are only open for another month. You can register at http://registration.esug.org/ (running on Seaside). This server comes with new features: you can now do a group registration and make a single payment; it also allows you to book and pay for reduction tickets (typically for Golden and Platinum sponsors).
The ESUG 2010 conference preliminary schedule is available at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010
