Thanks Tim.

I even tried to find the old Potatoe Smalltalk which was a port of an old 
Smalltalk-80 image as it had a working ide and yet the smallest count of 
classes.



Sent from my Commodore 64

> On 31 Dec 2016, at 1:01 am, Tim Mackinnon <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I think we've gone off topic -  James would simply like advice on what a 
> minimal image could/should be composed of.
> 
> That doesn't sound like a lot of work to help with that.
> 
> I know there is a minimal image project in Pharo, but I'm not sure how 
> minimal it got. I recall Marcus once telling me that the trick might be to 
> get things to a place where you could bootstrap metacello and load in 
> whatever you needed. I'm not sure if that is still the goal? But that would 
> strike me as the core library he's interested in?
> 
> Equally there was some work around having a scripting language using a 
> command line Pharo for build type things. I don't recall its name - but again 
> I'm sure it relies on a core set of classes that are used to bootstrap stuff 
> as well.
> 
> If someone can point to either of those two things that might help James 
> enough.
> 
> I know his actual project is hosted in GitHub and doesn't really distract 
> anything going on here. It's on my todo list to check it out.
> 
> Tim
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On 30 Dec 2016, at 13:49, Dimitris Chloupis <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> The problem for an open source community as this one is time and money
>> 
>> As Stef says "give me a million dollars and I will give you a Pharo million 
>> times better" 
>> 
>> that's the dream world
>> 
>> in real world we all have very limited time that we focus on the sides of 
>> Pharo that interest us the most. Obviously we are here to help people use 
>> Pharo under any condition and requirement. As such I think and hope that I 
>> speak for everyone that we are more than happy to offer advice to help Pharo 
>> extend its influence on other platforms. 
>> 
>> To actually contribute code will need Pharo developers that are experienced 
>> Java developers too (I am not). 
>> 
>> Problem is that neither Java nor Javascript have good reputation and as such 
>> people who can avoid them do so.
>> 
>> For example even though we can justify the freeze of a project like Redline 
>> Smalltalk because of the tiny size of the Smalltalk community but take 
>> something huge in popularity like Python, the official release of Python is 
>> CPython with an estimate of over 2 million developers world wide ,  Jython 
>> which is the port of Python in JVM has actually smaller community than we 
>> have at least last time I checked few gears ago. Just think about it for a 
>> minute. 
>> 
>> Its super hard to convince a python developer to switch to jython and so is 
>> for a java developer. 
>> 
>> This applies for all languages, I think the reasoning is that each language 
>> is not just a tool but an entire culture and people pick them for specific 
>> reasons, 
>> 
>> Javascript situation is more or less the same, python has no actively 
>> supported javascript equivelant. 
>> 
>> Again I am using Python as an example, different languages same or similar 
>> scenario. 
>> 
>> This is why I suggested to bring Redline closer to Pharo rather than porting 
>> some Pharo classes to JVM. 
>> 
>> Amber failed to gain traction because it did the opposite of what I am 
>> suggesting , tried to convince people to give up Pharo and move completely 
>> to Amber (for the JS part) which is why it implemented its own IDE etc. 
>> Obviously it did not work and Amber is barely alive. 
>> 
>> PharoJS seem on the right path , at least for me, so maybe there is still 
>> hope. 
>> 
>> In any case its not hard to use libraries from other programming language in 
>> Pharo with some form of IPC, I do this for using python libraries from Pharo 
>> and I making something similar for C++. Took me only a few hundred lines of 
>> code to do it for both and works pretty well. IPC can work with pretty much 
>> any language and as many languages at the same time as you want or your 
>> processor can handle. 
>> 
>> There are a ton of projects out there that use multiple languages that work 
>> together as one unit. Problem is that you can approach this through a 
>> billion diffirent angles and it will depend on the specific problem you want 
>> to solve. I build my own IPC tools to fit my specific needs which are Unreal 
>> (game engine) and Blender (3d application). 
>> 
>> There was a cool idea from a presentation a Smalltalker once gave about 
>> moving a DigiTalk implementation to JVM whithout changing a thing inside the 
>> image. Instead they ported the bytecode from smalltalk to JVM and used JNI 
>> for the C libraries. Sound too good to be true, they supposed to release it 
>> open source ages ago but that turned out to be another vaporware. 
>> 
>> I also agree that Cuis is a very good start to find the most essential 
>> libraries for Pharo. There is also a minimal image for pharo on the dowload 
>> section of the website which should give a good idea. But as it is to be 
>> expected its impossible to predict what is essential for each Pharo user and 
>> there lies the challenge. 
>> 
>>> On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 1:59 PM Tim Mackinnon <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Actually I think James is on to something and we should try and support him.
>>> 
>>> Having recently played with AWS Lambda and written a few Alexa services in 
>>> JS,  I was intrigued how you would approach such end points in Smalltalk 
>>> and whether it would be a productive language and environment to run them 
>>> in. (Btw - the lambda environment is very interesting - scalable 
>>> infrastructure that is peanuts to run).
>>> 
>>> To try this, the basic building blocks provided by these services are 
>>> either JS or Java - so for Smalltalkers that sounds like Smalltalk running 
>>> on Amber or Redline.
>>> 
>>> I find Amber and all the JS infrastructure very daunting - gulp, amd etc. 
>>> And for Lambda you also get caught into this world of package management 
>>> and loading up JS dependencies.
>>> 
>>> I'm intrigued how a jvm Smalltalk might approach this problem (as well as 
>>> many others I'm sure). We seem to achieve a lot with quite a small image of 
>>> building blocks.
>>> 
>>> As pharo is a research community, can we help James explore this a bit 
>>> more? Certainly there is a drive to a minimal Smalltalk image - so that 
>>> work can immediately feed into this.
>>> 
>>> To add to the research'y side context - these service infrastructures seem 
>>> to feel a lot like callable blocks of code. We are used to thinking in this 
>>> way in our image - we use blocks everywhere. How might they run in a 
>>> scaleable environment vs straight function call languages?
>>> 
>>> Tim
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>>> On 30 Dec 2016, at 09:31, Dimitris Chloupis <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I think what most people would want is to use Java libraries from inside 
>>>> Pharo. You seem to want to bring Pharo classes to Redline Runtime .
>>>> 
>>>> I have the opposite idea of bringing Redline Runtime inside Pharo and give 
>>>> us Pharo developers an easy way to use Java libraries and mix pharo with 
>>>> java code. I think also Pharo would serve great as an IDE for Redline 
>>>> Smalltalk. 
>>>> 
>>>> I already have JNIPort thats does that but none will complain to have 
>>>> another tool around, I am sure it will come very handy. 
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 2:08 AM James Ladd <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Hi Pharo People,
>>>> 
>>>> I have continued work on Redline Smalltalk and I'm wanting to discuss what
>>>> the absolute minimum
>>>> set of Classes and method should be included in the Redline Runtime.
>>>> 
>>>> Would anyone here like to participate in that discussion?
>>>> 
>>>> - James.
>>>> Redline Smalltalk <http://redline.st>
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> View this message in context: 
>>>> http://forum.world.st/Redline-Talking-Runtime-basics-tp4928375.html
>>>> Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at 
>>>> Nabble.com.
>>>> 

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