SqueakNOS: Smalltalk as a Standalone OS (2011) | Hacker News Reader

SqueakNOS: Smalltalk as a Standalone OS (2011)

wiki.squeak.org

60 pointsmasijo23 comments

Recently I wanted to teach my kid Smalltalk and I deep-dived into the current Smalltalk landscape... I wanted to show him how to create desktop apps using a "UI Designer" tool (like it was possible with WindowBuilder in Visual Smalltalk in the 1990s). Impossible to get a copy of Visual Smalltalk these days... Pharo doesn't have a UI designer... VA Smalltalk by Instantiations isn't free anymore... VisualWorks is not free...

What about Squeak?

Yes, and Cuis is also good:

https://cuis.st/

Cuis aims to be reasonably complete and polished, and very stable, while having fewer base classes than Squeak, and way fewer than Pharo.

They specifically called out the lack of a UI designer. Which isn't really a thing in Squeak, Pharo, etc.

Though that's kind of not fully the case when one consider Morphic is a kind of prototype-based authoring tool. There's an interactive authoring/physical manipulation aspect to Morphic UI construction.

You can make any GUI from Morphs so you don't need a Specific GUI designer.

But if you want one:

https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/trac/SqueakCommuni...

Yeah, the landscape is quite sad. I've never used the smalltalk UI Designer, how was it like? Do you have a video/article about it?

Very similar to WindowBuilder Pro for Java. There are videos on YouTube (search for WindowBuilder).

Regarding VisualWorks: https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/

If you scroll down to the bottom/footer, under "Get started" you can click "Buy Cincom Smalltalk": https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/product/cincom-smalltal...

Ok, you can't (page not found), but the link above is "Try Cincom Smalltalk": https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/try/ there you can download a "personal edition". Well, you have to fill out a form and provide some information to get the download link.

Perhaps this is an option for you.

I filled out the form 12 days ago, I never heard back from then, I didn't receive a link :(.

And this is one of the reasons Smalltalk did not take off in the 90s. All the useful versions priced themselves for the enterprise or took over the ones tuned for Windows.

See Gilad Bracha's view on why Smalltalk did not take off https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-o... for more complete view.

From my point of view, having IBM fully pivot from Smalltalk into Java was one of the biggest reasons, and the millions that Sun pumped into having the JDK available as free beer.

On OS/2, SOM (much better COM like API), also had support for Smalltalk besides C and C++, effectively giving Smalltalk a role in OS/2, similar to VB and later .NET on Windows.

Smalltalk/V from the late 1980s was quite cheap, as I recall.

For example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32441206

Yes that was the one I used and was the one that I meant by saying "took over the ones tuned for Windows."

I think ParcPlace took it over and replaced it by the expensive one which was OS independent and not tuned to Windows.

In 1995 Digitalk already charged a few thousands bucks for VisualSmalltalk...

Previously "The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk (2020)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223880

https://github.com/dolphinsmalltalk/Dolphin Dolphin had a 'view composer' but obviously it's a bit pining for the fjords.

It’s not the same as a point click up builder, but spec is pretty easy to get something started. I’d love to see a visual designer though, not sure why that hasn’t been made yet.

I prefer making Etoys apps on top of Squeak

A SqueakNOS (a Squeak without an operating system but with a few device drivers written in Squeak Smalltalk) can run on SiliconSqueak microprocessor hardware. We are making a <$1 microcontroller, manycore FPGAs and a Wafer Scale Integration[1]. Contact us if you want to help or help fund.

[1] morphle {at} ziggo {dot} nl

[2] https://vimeo.com/731037615

A slightly more updated (2018) revival of the same project is available here: https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS

No, this uses some stripped OS as an OS, instead of having Squeak itself be the OS.

CogNos was supposed to be a mostly Smalltalk OS - as I understand it, the C and assembler code is just for booting and catching interrupts. The device drivers, file system, and network stack are all in Smalltalk. In addition to the repository, there is this conference paper:

https://charig.github.io/assets/papers/SCDE-DLS.pdf

The paper says "there would certainly be much more work needed before one could consider deploying our system." The project seems to be inactive now.

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