[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

WebAssembly (WASM) 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. Craig Latta 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  to receive th

For our first online meeting of the year, Stéphane Rollandin will talk to us about muO: musical objects for Squeak . 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 Small

For our holiday meeting, Simberon 's David Buck will present Beagle Smalltalk. Over the past 8 years, David has been developing a Smalltalk virtual machine. He used it to release two Smalltalk Games written in VisualWorks to run on Andriod and iPhone devices. More recently, he's re-written the VM to use its own bytecode set and written his own Smalltalk compiler to make it a stand-alone Smalltalk environment called Beagle Smalltalk named after the ship that took Darwin on his voyage of discovery. David plans to release this as an open-source Smalltalk to help and encourage kids to explore the world of programming. In this talk, David presents the current status of the project and where he hopes to go with it. David Buck is the president of Simberon - a company that has been providing Smalltalk training and consulting for over 25 years. Along with James Robertson, David produced the Industry Misinterpretations podcast and later the Smalltalk Reflections podcast with Craig Latta.

Dave Mason 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 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 ru

For this month's meeting, we'll take it easy and have an online social! Bring your favourite drinks - beer, coffee, or whatever you prefer! 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 to receive the meeting details. Update 26 February 2022: Aik-Siong Koh's presentation on digital twins using Smalltalk is now available on Vimeo .

After a two year pause, the ESUG conference returned this past summer when Smalltalkers from all over the world met in Novi Sad, Serbia for a week of presentations, and socials. For this month's meeting, we'll have an open discussion about what was presented at the conference. If you've been there, join us to tell us what you liked, and why. If you could not go, join us and discover what went down in Novi Sad! 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 to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!