Self-interest April 2022

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

3 participants
3 discussions

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 - Wednesday, April 27th
by Giovanni Corriga 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be held on Wednesday, April 27th 2022. Newspeak ( https://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html ) is a programming system in the Smalltalk tradition, whose current incarnation runs in the web browser. Newspeak is designed to provide the liveness Smalltalkers expect, as well as features atypical of Smalltalk such as modularity, security and good interoperability with the surrounding ecosystem. In this talk, we'll explain how and why Newspeak differs from Smalltalk and demonstrate the Newspeak IDE. Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5, and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications, and the Dart Programming Language. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. 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/cbklbrydcgbkc/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

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memory systems in Linux and Mac virtual machines
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 07 Apr '22

07 Apr '22

A while back I wanted to show off the Self spy to illustrate a point to a friend. To stress the memory system so it would be clear how it worked I started by creating a small vector: vector copySize: 1000 and then filled it in with a bunch of other vectors: 0 to: size-1 Do: [| :i | at: i Put: (vector copySize: 10)] then at each step I doubled the size of the leaf vectors: 0 to: size-1 Do: [| :i | at: i Put: (vector copySize: 2*(at:i) size)] Just to keep track where we were, after each step I would evaluate (at: 0) size As expected, the system was forced to create a new segment by the time I got to 2560. It crashed on the next step, though sometimes I got one more step before it crashed. At this point the heap is only a few megabytes in size, so this shouldn't be a problem. This was a 2017 Linux virtual machine. Today I had the idea to try the exact same thing on a 2017 Macintosh virtual machine. With it I was able to get all the way up to 81920 and it didn't crash like in Linux but the infamous colored beachball has been spinning for a couple of hours now. Not counting object headers, this step is trying to grow the heap from about 320MB to around twice that. The spy showed exactly what I wanted to illustrate with the old space having grown to around 90 segments. I had expected the behavior of both VMs to be the same, but it seems that the Linux version it less stable. Does anyone else have a similar experience? -- Jecel

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Self-interest April 2022