Self-interest November 2022

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

7 participants
7 discussions

Nice article on Self via HackNews
by Steve Dekorte 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

"I’ve been reading a bunch of old papers from the Self project. It’s pretty incredible how many things they invented that are absolutely essential in modern, high-performance managed language runtimes. It might be the most influential programming language that most programmers have never heard of…” https://dubroy.com/blog/self/

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OurSelf.io April update - TerminalMorph!
by Russell Allen 30 Nov '22

30 Nov '22

Hi all! Work continues on OurSelf.io at a feverish pace (literally as I got a mild case of Covid - like everyone else!) My immediate aim is to get to a place where the full cycle of Self development can happen without needing a local VM and without having to SSH into the server. The first part of this is building access from within the Self image to the underlying FreeBSD jail so that the developer can use the existing unix tools - git, ssh etc - to sync .self files to GitHub or wherever. If you start a trial now on OurSelf.io you will see a new menu item - New Unix Terminal - which will, as the name suggests, open a morph which is a unix terminal. It is a very basic terminal, just enough for running simple commands and not enough for TUI apps such as vi etc. But with it, I can (if I’m logged in and not just doing a trial) - use the Transporter to file out modules - commit those modules to a git repository - push the commits to GitHub - pull changes - read those changes in via the Transporter I can also build new snapshots, and if I save them as ‘/self/snapshot’ and restart the OurSelf world then the new snapshot will replace the existing one. (I’m thinking of this as temporary, the long term aim is to pull everything into Self so that no one needs know how and on what the image is running. But we’re a way off that) Cheers Russell

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UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - 30 November 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 29 Nov '22

29 Nov '22

For this month's UKSTUG meeting, Dave Mason will talk about Zag Smalltalk, a new Smalltalk VM written in Zig. Dave Mason ( http://sarg.ryerson.ca/dmason/ ) has been a professor of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University (previously known as Ryerson) for 41 years. He has done research on operating systems, software reliability and programming languages. Current research is mostly around Smalltalk and other dynamic languages. If forced to program very low level projects such as virtual machines, he is willing to use Zig or Rust, but for any other purpose, he insists on using higher productivity languages - primarily Smalltalk. Zag Smalltalk ( https://github.com/dvmason/Zag-Smalltalk ) is a principle-based Smalltalk VM. "Principled" means that the only 3 operations are: message send, assignment, and return. 1) it is designed from the ground up to use multi-processing, to leverage multi-core systems. 2) There is no special-casing of methods like ifTrue:ifFalse or whileTrue:, although of course some methods are implemented by primitive methods. It does aggressive inlining of methods and blocks. 3) “Source” code is maintained as ASTs. 4) Compiled code runs in a dual form of threaded code and JIT’ed machine code that seamlessly interoperate. 5) It has a partially-copying and partially-non-moving garbage collector. 6) It keeps many more values as immediate, including symbols. 7) It uses a single-level dispatch mechanism to implement Smalltalk dispatch semantics The research question is, "Can this be made fast enough to be competitive?” Preliminary results are encouraging. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/290036186 ) to receive the meeting details.

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precompiled header on linux
by Valery Ushakov 26 Nov '22

26 Nov '22

It seems that the makefile fragment to generate the precompiled header doesn't apply COMPILE_DEFINITIONS (various -D flags) and CXX_FLAGS (for -O that also affects some internal defines like __NO_INLINE__) at the time the precompiled header is generated, so all subsequent compilations generate -Winvalid-pch warnings. Manually fixing up $(build)/vm/CMakeFiles/Self.dir/build.make helps, but I don't know any cmake to fix it properly. Please, can someone with a cmake clue fix this? TIA. -uwe

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Looking for presenters for UK Smalltalk User Group online meetings
by Giovanni Corriga 21 Nov '22

21 Nov '22

Hi, The UK Smalltalk User Group is looking for presenters for the online events that we have been running since April 2020. If you have anything you'd like to share with the community - no matter how small! - please contact us at info(a)uksmalltalk.org or giovanni(a)corriga.net to discuss what you can offer. Cheers, Giovanni

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Self language awesome list
by Stephen De Gabrielle 09 Nov '22

09 Nov '22

I just started an ‘Awesome list’ for Self https://github.com/Self-language-unofficial/awesome-self-language/blob/main… Contributions welcome. S. -- ----

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Self discord (chat) forum
by Stephen De Gabrielle 09 Nov '22

09 Nov '22

If there is any interest there is a self discord (chat) at https://discord.gg/KHFMGdvmnG It is not ‘official’ in any way, anyone/everyone is welcome. Apart from chat it also has integrated screen sharing. It *is* a ‘walled garden’. It is free. If you are not familiar with discord, it is a chat service like IRC, with a UI that is almost identical to slack. It is particularly popular with young people. It might also be of interest that Pharo also has a discord at https://discord.gg/zKEP4tNz Best regards Stephen -- ----

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Self-interest November 2022