[comp.lang.smalltalk] Whither thou GNUest...

jorice@maths.tcd.ie (Jonathan Rice) (02/04/91)

I don't mean to sound pushy or anything, but what on earth has happened
to GNU Smalltalk? Version 1 was released I guess 6 months ago and since then
there's been practically NO discussion of it here. What gives? I know it was a
bit basic, but fundamentally it seemed like a good system. It just needed
a bit of work. Can a GNU person tell me what is the state of play of the
development of this system at the moment? I hope it hasn't stalled.

o----------------------o---------------------------o--------------------------o
|    Jonathan Rice     | Email: jorice@cs.tcd.ie   | He was a common fly      |
|----------------------| Tel: 353.1.772941 x2156(w)| With a taste for fashion |
|Computer Science Dept.|      353.1.6245415     (h)| They were thrown together|
|  Trinity College     | Fax: 353.1.772204         | In a heat of passion     |
|     Dublin 2,        |              woof /\___/  |         - "Human Fly",   |
|     Ireland.         |                    /| |\  |          The Horseflies  |
o----------------------o---------------------------o--------------------------o

sbb@laplace.eng.sun.com (Steve Byrne) (02/05/91)

GNU Smalltalk is making progress towards version 1.2.  I'm taking a little
break from working on it to participate in a contest for writing NeWS
applications (yeah, yeah, I know, but I kind of like the NeWS model...it's
surprisingly Smalltalk-like in many ways).  I'm looking at about a month's work
after I get done with the NeWS application, so that puts the next release date
at the end of March or early April.  After that, I'll probably produce a
bug-fix release (if necessary :-) before working on 2.0 (which will have the
whizzy compiler).

1.2 features include a complete X protocol interface (and maybe some higher
level interfaces), performance improvements (I'm getting > 200k bytecodes/sec
for very simple code, and > 100K for typical code), C call-ins, ability to
directly create and manipulate C structs from Smalltalk, an improved Emacs
editing mode, including a class browser, support for large integers, a port to
VMS, etc.

Steve