Craig Latta - WebAssembly as a Smalltalk Compilation Target (v1) - 22 February 2023

By

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 the meeting details.

Update 26 August 2023: The recording of Craig's presentation is now live on Vimeo.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vector Graphics in Cuis Smalltalk - Wednesday 31st March

By
The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, March 31st.   In this meeting, Juan Vuletich will present a Vector Graphic implementation in Cuis Smalltalk. Graphics for interactive software have traditionally been constrained for performance reasons. The consequence is that most software has serious trouble adapting to higher resolution screens, requires platform specific widget kits, provides limited functionality, and has sub optimal visual quality. But improvements in computing power over the last couple of decades enable a brighter future: Cuis Smalltalk provides a VectorGraphics based implementation of the Morphic UI framework that addresses all these issues. Juan Vuletich is a long standing member of the Open Source Smalltalk community. He started Cuis Smalltalk 12 years ago and has led it ever since. He has been contributing kernel code to Squeak and the Squeak VM for over 20 years. He holds an Ms.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Air
Read more

Nov 22: Michael Lucas-Smith on Xtreams

By
In order to welcome Michael Lucas-Smith and Helge Nowak, who will be visiting London this month, we've moved our November monthly meeting one week earlier to Monday, November 22. Michael has offered to give us an in-depth presentation on Xtreams , a streaming framework with a new and refreshingly consistent API. From the project page: Xtreams is a generalized stream/iterator framework providing [a] simple, unified API for reading from different kinds of sources and writing into different kinds of destinations (Collections, Sockets, Files, Pipes, etc). Streams themselves can be sources or destinations as well. This allows to stack streams on top of each other. It is the stacking nature of the streams that give this framework its real power and, from what Michael and Martin (Kobetic) have shown me, you can do some pretty impressive stuff. Martin's presentation at ESUG only scratched the surface, apparently, and Michael intends to delve even deeper. There will also be plenty of ti
Read more