This month, the UKSTUG will take a look at Objective-S , an architecture-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C, by hosting his creator Marcel Weiher. As per Alan Kay, “Code seems large and complicated for what it does” . Objective-S addresses one source of this accidental complexity: using software architectural abstraction to directly expresses the much wider variety of architectural styles typical of modern software systems, compared to traditional programming languages that still follow the call/return architectural style of scientific programs from the early days of computing. Marcel Weiher started his forays into dynamic object-oriented computing by implementing Objective-C on his Amiga 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Stops on the way have been at Apple, the BBC, Microsoft and various startups, as well as contributing to Squeak. He is currently a principal software engineer at Citymapper and PhD student at HPI, where he is trying to distill some ...
Egg is a new Smalltalk dialect that was designed from scratch to incorporate some interesting features: A module system with namespaces that replaces the old-good Smalltalk global. Dynamic identifiers, which are bound lazily similarly to how methods are lazily bound. A multi-VM architecture, with different VM implementations written in C++, Pharo, JavaScript and Egg. The Egg-in-Egg VM is special in that the VM component is just another module of the system, creating what we have named Live Metacircular Runtimes (LMRs) [1]. The most interesting characteristic of LMRs in Smalltalk is that they can be developed using standard Smalltalk tools, which shorten feedback loops when doing VM development. During the talk I'll show a little bit about Egg and its LMR, and how not only VM developers get more productive when writing VMs, but also application developers can better understand what the VM does behind the scenes. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16973 - Live Objects All Th...
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 t...
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