Self-interest February 2023

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

3 participants
2 discussions

Self on PPC
by Valery Ushakov 19 Feb '23

19 Feb '23

I have spent a couple of evenings kicking the source tree to get it to compile on NetBSD/macppc, hoping for some low-hanging fruits to fall. I see from the history that the port was removed but then David rolled that change back, so I guess it's not entirely unwanted. I pushed the results to github: https://github.com/nbuwe/self/tree/feature/netbsd-macppc This branch is off the feature/netbsd-i386 branch that Russell might hopefully merge to dev. The changes are confined to the ppc subdir except for bringing back ppc support in cmake files and one small tweak to netbsd-specific kludge in allocation.cpp. These changes should not affect i386 builds in any way. One manual kludge I have to use to build the tree is to compile only the search_ppc.cpp file with -maltivec - my cmake-fu is non existent, so I don't know how to do express that properly. (I tried to keep macosx/ppc parts intact. I guess I can eventually set up macos on an external drive - I have the retail dvd for the last version that supported ppc - and see if it compiles, but I guess the demand for that is vanishingly small and I'd rather sink my not so copious free time into making it actually work on netbsd. :) The resulting binary doesn't work - not that I expected it to. After I had time to look past the surface level problems of making it to compile, I see that the frame code is written for the macos ABI: Inside Macintosh: Introduction to PowerPC System Software, 1-44 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/PPC_Syste… so of course that doesn't work on ELF ABI with a different stack frame layout. Adapting to ELF ABI (while, ideally, not breaking macos) is a bit too much for my current time budget. I realize there's probably not much practical demand for the working ppc port, but doing these changes was quick and easy, didn't break anything (hopefully) and that leaves it in a batter shape. So on an off chance that someone might be interested in picking this up, the tree is in a mostly buildable state. Broken windows theory and all that... -uwe

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 22 February 2023
by Giovanni Corriga 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

WebAssembly (WASM - https://wikiwand.com/en/Webassembly ) is an instruction format for portable high-performance code, run by a stack-based virtual machine. To Smalltalkers, this sounds very familiar. WASM is supported by the three most popular web browsers, and by other host platforms as well. Perhaps we can translate certain Smalltalk compiled methods to WASM, augmenting our support for physical processors and for livecoding the Web. For our February meeting, Craig Latta will describe his initial experiments, using the Epigram compilation framework ( https://thiscontext.com/epigram ). Craig Latta ( https://thiscontext.com/ ) is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discovery of a mysteriously-placed copy of the Blue Book at university led to stints at several exploratory labs, and a pursuit of improvisation wherever code is found. 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/291365015/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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Self-interest February 2023