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Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

The problem I have with Smalltalk (and I love the idea!) is that when I want to save things in Git, or when I want to deploy something minimal, things are so glued with each other that I find difficult to figure out what belongs to me.

There are also other problems:

- a desktop app cannot look like a regular one, at least in Pharo.

- I am not sure how to glue native code, so when doing graphics stuff (this is what I really want to do with Pharo bc of its interactivity) I did not know how to consume APIs for drawing.

I do not have a lot of training admittedly. The interactivity looks super, super cool! But also you have to change a lot of habits.

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Pharo is bootstrapped, and its building process starts with a really minimal image (even the compiler is not included). It is possible to build custom images of any size. You need to take care of packages and dependencies, of course.

Pharo can make applications with a native look & feel - https://github.com/pharo-spec/Spec-Gtk.

Current Pharo has a very solid and powerful FFI, so using C libraries is easy.

Pharo 10 will use a native GUI backend.

Also, git is well-integrated.

Yes, I saw git is integrated. The problem is that I am not sure how to use it. Any docs? Probably there were but my visit was some time ago.

It would rock to have native GUI. Also, if I could know how to draw graphics... That would be very nice also, because having an interactive environment for graphics is the most awesome stuff that Pharo can offer (me).

There is a booklet about Git integration: http://books.pharo.org/booklet-ManageCode/pdf/2019-03-24-Man...

For 2D graphics, Pharo uses Cairo binding named Athens (and Roassal as another convinient layer above that).

For 3D, you may be interesting in Godotalk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncmERef0EFo, https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/godotalk/)

I started working on a raylib binding for pharo using pharo's ffi...I have to say pharo's ffi system is very easy to use. It works and I got a few demos working, but I haven't put in the function calls for most of raylib. https://github.com/Zenchess/pharoRaylib

There's also native pharo smalltalk stuff like athens, woden, and maybe others... Personally I have moved to using Dolphin Smalltalk and raylib bindings there as it's been more performant and I prefer Dolphin over pharo. Dolphin also has good external interfacing support and is more of a native Windows OS smalltalk distro. If you're looking for building native windows looking applications on windows at least probably your best bet is dolphin and it's free and open source.

> Pharo 10 will use a native GUI backend.

Will this mean HIDPI support too?

Yes please...

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