Call for papers for IWST in Edinburgh
25 February, 2011
Alain Plaintec has published the call for papers for the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies which will be held on 23rd August during the ESUG 2011 conference in Edinburgh. The goal of the workshop is to “create a forum around advances or experience in Smalltalk and to trigger discussions and exchanges of ideas”.
Participants are invited to submit short and not-so short research articles, of two kinds
- Short position papers describing emerging ideas.
- Long research papers with deeper description of experiments and of research results.
Contributions can be on a wide range of topics, including meta-programming and meta-modeling, new dialects or languages implemented in Smalltalk and experience reports.
Key dates:
- Submission: 17th June
- Feedback: 15th July
- Workshop: 23rd August
Squeak 4.2 final now out!
3 February, 2011
Squeak4.2-10966.zip is now available at http://ftp.squeak.org/4.2. This is intended to be the actual-released 4.2 image, unless, as Chris Muller says, “we find some problem, which we won’t!”.
Some of the new features in this release are:
- Preparation for adoption of Cog VM
- Significant class-library and IDE improvements, with many speed improvements
- High-precision Clock (microsecond precision)
- Cleaned-up code base, with better support for unloading optional packages and fonts.
- The last of the underscore assignments have been replaced with ANSI assignments.
- Refactoring and unification of Smalltalk and SmalltalkImage globals.
- API for stdio access (requires recent VM)
- Improved command-line interface
- Better Documentation (see Help > Help Browser)
- SUnit now supports timeouts
- More UI work including a tweaked look and feel, and support for translucent fonts
- Support for classic MVC has been restored to Squeak for better support of slower devices
- System Reporter (found under Help > About this system) – a tool to simplify and standardise the reporting of your image’s set-up.
See Help > Welcome Workspaces > Welcome to Squeak 4.2 for more details of the changes in this image.
Note that users on Macs may find that the mouse buttons work in an unexpected order in this image. This is expected behaviour to allow for the grand reunification of mouse button handling in the upcoming version of the VM, which will restore the standard behaviour. In the meantime, use the Swap Mouse Buttons preference to keep things sane.
Congratulations to Chris Muller who has been leading the effort to get this release out the door, as well as the many contributors who provided updates, error checking, bug fixes and moral support for the process.
