Self-interest January 2023

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

8 participants
4 discussions

C preprocessor for asm
by Valery Ushakov 20 Jan '23

20 Jan '23

Asm sources in Self currently use assembler's macro facilities that differ between clang and gas. Recent versions of clang asm is gas compatible, but then as far as I understand apple's clang is special. llvm's asm behaves differently if "IsDarwin" and the current llvm macro code in Self is effectively apple-only. I'm working on a NetBSD port and NetBSD supports both gcc and clang as system compilers. I will porbably look at the FreeBSD port too and FreeBSD is now clang only, afaik. This makes it a bit painful to work with the current asm sources. Would there be any objections to switching Self i386 asm sources to use the C pre-processor? NetBSD has been doing that for ages (for a large zoo of CPUs) and it's quite ok. Some examples https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/arch/i386/include/asm.h https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/lib/libc/arch/i386/SYS.h just to give a general idea of what it looks like. So, e.g. start_exported_function currentFrame will just become start_exported_function(currentFrame) Or MACRO(ret_prim_error, error_code) ... ret_bad_type: ret_prim_error badTypeOffset will be #define ret_prim_error(error_code) \ ... ; \ ... ret_bad_type: ret_prim_error(badTypeOffset) -uwe

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Suggestions for cross platform build?
by Russell Allen 19 Jan '23

19 Jan '23

Hi everyone, It looks like we should be able to do a release in the reasonably near future of the Self VM compiled for Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD and maybe Cygwin (but probably not Mac), thanks to some work by nbuwe and rockwalrus. See https://github.com/nbuwe/self/tree/feature/netbsd-i386 <https://github.com/nbuwe/self/tree/feature/netbsd-i386> And https://github.com/rockwalrus/self/tree/cygwin <https://github.com/rockwalrus/self/tree/cygwin> (these will need to be harmonised) But to do that, I need a decent automated build for each platform so I'm not manually mucking around with virtual machines etc. I can't see anyone doing all those OS as a service (mostly they're just Linux+MacOS maybe Windows). Any suggestions on how to go about this? Surely there is an existing thing I can just use :) Cheers Russell

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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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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 25th January 2023
by Giovanni Corriga 17 Jan '23

17 Jan '23

For the first UKSTUG online meeting of the year, Stéphane Rollandin will talk to us about muO: musical objects for Squeak ( http://www.zogotounga.net/comp/squeak/sqgeo.htm ). The presentation will focus on some of the interactive tools and subsystems widely used in muO, that are of interest in their own right, and potentially useful to others. The main emphasis will be on the large family of zoomable fields, which are modular plotting editors. Stéphane will demonstrate the workflow they are designed for, and show in what sense it is a seamless and natural exploitation of the Morphic framework. The code for these tools is somewhat entangled with the muO package, so Stéphane will also provide a Squeak image taylored to help people find their way there. Stéphane Rollandin has been doing independent research on software for musical composition and representation for the last 20 years, during his whole careeer as a stay-at-home father. After developing the GeoMaestro system for KeyKit, and the Csound-x package for Emacs, he was introduced to Smalltalk and never looked back. Besides muO, he developed for Squeak a modular Lisp interpreter, the LambdaMessageSend framework and a few games. He is now working on an experimental game engine with an emphasis on procedural generation and complex autonomous agents. He was formally educated in physics, and his other artistic ventures are in photography and aikido. His music is freely available online ( https://stephanerollandin.bandcamp.com/ ). Born in Marseille, he currently lives in the southern French Alps. 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/290746320/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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Self-interest January 2023