Slang: The subset of Smalltalk that can translate to C or other languages (2019)

I'm taking your question as genuine, but you provided some fun value with that hehehehehe

> I can see why this is frustrating, especially to someone with no C exposure. But bear in mind that the C underpinnings are part of the reason why these languages are popular in the first place -- like Perl used to be before Python.

I the idea GP is proposing here is that because C is so cumbersome, that is why scripting languages became prominent in the first place. I don't think this many would argue with this.

> In a very real sense, the entire concept of an interpreted language in the modern sense is such an ugly kludge

Here GP is implying that if C were nicer/better, or if some other low level language would have risen to prominence, the scripting langauges would not have been "necessary" or desirable in the same way.

> (much cleaner to "go all in" on the language, LISP machines being the notable predecessor) -- but do be aware of the tradeoff.

Here I assume GP is referring to the work in the 80s on Lisp machines where the idea was to build machines from the ground up more suited to a different paradigm. And thus obviating the need for a cumbersome language such as C.

I personally wonder if GP is familiar the "worse is better" essay?

The swiki is extremely old-school and simplistic and has suffered defacement issues in the past. Also, unfortunately, the overall Smalltalk community (at least the open source part) is both too small and at this time terribly fractured. Resources like the swiki have had little real attention for many many years.

This means that you can run the code as Smalltalk-80 inside Squeak and use all the tools like the Smalltalk debugger. When you are sure that it is working, you translate it to C and compile it to machine code. Now you would use GDB to debug that but in theory you won't have to as the code should just work.

Note that running the Slang version of the VM inside Smalltalk-80 gives you a fully functioning Smalltalk that is about 600 times slower than the Smalltalk it is inside of. The idea for Squeak was that machines had become so much faster than in the 1970s/1980s that even with this slowdown you could actually use the simulated Smalltalk enough to find all bugs.

On earlier computers such a simulation would be so slow that it would take many minutes for a menu to be drawn on the screen when you pressed a mouse button, for example. You would not get enough done to run into all the bugs. By the late 1990s this was no longer the case.