Richard Ronteltap - SmallJS - 26 February 2025

By

For our February 2025 presentation, Richard Ronteltap will present his SmallJS project.

SmallJS is a free and open source implementation of the elegant and powerful Smalltalk-80 (ST) language. It compiles to JavaScript (JS) that runs in modern browsers or in Node.js.
SmallJS is file based, not image based, so you can develop in your favorite IDE. The default setup is for Visual Studio Code, with ST syntax coloring and step debugging! You code separately from the SmallJS base libraries (image) and only the parts you use are imported automatically when running your app.
SmallJS is fully object oriented, so customizable on every level. For usability, ST class and method names are kept mostly equal to their familiar JS counterparts. JS libraries already encapsulated in ST are:

  • Browsers: Document, Window, HTML elements, events, CSS, streams.
  • Node.js: HTTP server, Express, 4 databases, files.

SmallJS is mostly intended for use by JS devs that want a nicer language to work in.
But it can also be used by existing ST devs that are willing to learn a new ST framework that can directly run in browsers and can seamlessly access the powerful Node.js ecosystem, without the need for bridges between overlapping frameworks.

Richard studied Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he used used Smalltalk-80 to write a query optimizer for a prototype OODBMS. He currently works in IT / Software Management within the IT department of the UvA.

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!

Update 28 February 2025: the recording of the presentation is now up on YouTube:


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Javier Pimas -- Live Metacircular Runtimes: The case of Egg Smalltalk - 29 June 2024

By
Image
 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...
Read more

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

By
Image
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...
Read more