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Comment by schpaencoder | Hacker News Reader

it is actually suprisingly fast

The demos are very slow for me. I dunno if I can somehow display it but it feels like ~10 FPS.

Did you try different browsers? The speed is very reasonable for me (considering the amount of BitBlt). I use SqueakJS to develop business software (using only Smalltalk). In these applications I am running SqueakJS headless and create a GUI using WebComponents (created through Smalltalk classes). This also runs very fast (tested on Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

Could you elaborate how this works – Headless SqueakJS plus WebComponents GUI?

Instead of having a Smalltalk image which contains the typical GUI (Morphic or otherwise being BitBlt on a HTML Canvas) I run a Smalltalk image which has a number of Classes representing WebComponents. These classes have a small interface with Javascript (implemented as primitive calls in case you are familiar, similar to other SqueakJS plugins). When instantiating such a WebComponent, it will also instantiate a DOM element (the WebComponent). Events in the browser are wrapped in Smalltalk event classes and will be given to an event handler process (Smalltalk process) which will do the relevant work. So for example drag and drop is implemented fully in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk image I run to have this Web UI (and run only a Web UI, no business logic in the browser) is very small. It is only a little over 200Kb. My code is free to use. See https://github.com/ErikOnBike/CodeParadise I need to add some more documentation and more demos. I have been very busy with developing software and have been lacking a bit in giving some love to those. Edit: An explanation and demo can be found here: https://vimeo.com/457353130

Interesting. At 54:55 Tim Rowledge mentions Distributed Smalltalk by Chris Mala (not sure about the name). Is there any information about this? I could not find anything what seemed relevant or recent.

That would be "Chris Muller". Chris wrote, amongst other things, the Magma database and the Maui user interface stuff. Take a look at http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/rBdVcxgb for the Magma code and http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/yM0obItA for the client-server stuff. You might also be interested in the image spawning capabilities in Dave Lewis' OSProcess project; very fast forking of running images with their own work to do etc. See http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/uLwQvnlU

Nope, tested it on Vivaldi only. I may give Firefox and Chromium a try, too.

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