Hi Kilon, Hi Ralph, I wish I could answer with concrete information. But that's not what I spend my time doing. However, I need to correct the impression the following answers give. I think they're discouraging to say the least.
On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 2:03 PM, kilon alios <[email protected]> wrote: > I am no Pharo expert but will try to answer with what I know > > 1) Pharo download is 16 mb compressed and 58 mb uncompressed. > and can be stripped. It is easy to get a development environment into 16Mb (e.g. Newspeak). Applications can easily fit in 16Mb. Applications don't need to be deployed with sources or changes files. > 2) Pharo is a standalone and as such it does not need installation. > Everything you need is in a single folder contained in a single zip with a > single download. I dont think you can get any easier than that. So its a > single task. > But there are scripts to create platform-compatible installers on Mac OS and Win32 if that's what you want. > 3) There are people who run Pharo on iOS like DrGeo. But Pharo does not > support those platforms and most likely you will experience few problems > with it. So its some extra work but its doable. They do represent a larger > market and a very important one I agree. > What does "not support" mean? People have successfully deployed apps on both iPhone and Android. Pharo can not (easily) be developed on iPhone but can be deployed there-on. One can't develop iPhone apps on iPhone. you need a Mac for that. Does that mean Apple don't support iPhone?? > 4) Again I dont know the issues on those platforms but bare in mid, Pharo > is a dynamic language and dynamic language are definetly not a first choice > for those platforms for game because they are slower than official > supported languages. Those are in iOS ObjectiveC and on Android Java. All > that assuming your game has some demanding graphics. For simple graphics > with not much animation and such you should be ok. > I disagree with 4. If graphics are done by external libraries (and note that even BitBlt in Pharo/Squeak is not implemented in Squeak, but in C) graphics can be as fast in Pharo as in anything else. > > Personally I think its not a good idea, because Pharo does not support > those platforms well. I think that in that scenario there is a better > alternative , that of Javascript + Pharo. Its possible to use JS as front > end and Pharo as backend. If you dont want to code in Js there is Amber. > Web apps are quite performant so you will be able to do some really > impressive graphics with this recipe. You will be using also technologies > that are well documented and well tested. > IMO this is a /really bad/ answer. There are Pharo and Squeak apps deployed on Android and iPhone. The answer shouldn't be "this is a bad idea", it should be "you can deploy natively like this..., or you can deploy with a native UI and Smalltalk logic like this...". But the answer should never be "this is a bad idea". Alas I don't spend my time deploying apps so I don't know how to do it, only that people have (I have DrGeo on my iPhone). So can those that know please write an FAQ that answers ralph's question? I wish I could :-/ > > Also there are like a ton of game libraries for JS out there. Which will > lift the amount of work you will need to do for your game. > Kilon, please don't take this personally but someone could easily interpret your answer as "you're better off programming in JavaScript. Pharo can't do deployment. " That's both a terrible and an incorrect answer. I hope we can do much better. -- best, Eliot
