[Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad

[Russell Allen]

> On 17 Nov 2020, at 10:32 pm, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield <baltasarq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self
>> snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run.
>> The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and
>> scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to
>> develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not
>> just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I
>> would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which
>> includes images etc, which could be much larger again.
> 
> This is the main weakness of Self and other similar programming
> languages which rely on a snapshot (Squeak, SmallTalk). This could be
> solved by a true persistent system.

What do you mean by a true persistent system?

In this case at least the problem isn’t the snapshot itself, because 10MB is tiny, but the need to have the full GitHub repo (180M) and maybe in future, also having supporting data (eg a SQL database? Image files? My MP3 collection? All my company’s video training files?) as part of the package of stuff available to that 10MB snapshot.  

OurSelf is treating Self worlds less like a ‘Hello World” binary and more like a system image for a shared desktop, eg AWS Workspaces or equivalent. So the comparison is more like 10MB Self snapshot vs 2GB Ubuntu system image, or a docker image…

I’ve been trying to keep start time under 30s for each Self instance, which will be at the price of disk size by aggressively replicating (but disk space is cheap). Some actions will take longer though. A brand new 10GB bundle of Self snapshot +  supporting data will take time to send from one server to another no matter how many tricks I use.

Cheers Russell


> -- Baltasar
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Self-interest mailing list
> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org
> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest