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Cuis Smalltalk

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I learned about Cuis from Ian Jeffries in this podcast episode:

"A Haskeller Tries Smalltalk" - https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/6016b230a19ac42d3d0e03da...

This led to a follow-up conversation with Juan Vuletich, who created Cuis:

"Smalltalk's Past, Present, and Future" - https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/39a08ec8b9534ad7c8ae6339...

I really enjoyed both conversations!

> an active attitude towards system complexity: Just keep it to a minimum!

I would rather want a rich standard library which exposes all the common system facilities, algorithms and formats conveniently - the so-called "batteries included" approach.

Ideally I believe SmallTalk should be a layer of the operating system (but not try to replace the whole OS and implementations).

Anyone use this? How refined/practical (whatever that means) is compared to Squeak and Pharo?

I'm on a mac, how's HiDPI support? (Squeak is great here).

Cuis shares the OpenSmalltalk Virtual Machine with Squeak, Pharo and Newspeak.

Cuis Smalltalk was originally forked from Squeak Smalltalk.

What sets Cuis apart from other Smalltalk systems is the focus on the original values of the Smalltalk project at Xerox PARC, and an active attitude towards system complexity:

https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/blob/ma...

For what I know, Pharo VM was forked in the past from OpenSmalltalk, so they are no longer using the same

Indeed. https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm

I started to use it for fun side projects. Smalltalk thinking is very different from „mainstream“ programming paradigmns (everything is an object) and so refreshing (you can also inspect everything in runtime). Cuis rendering was so much better than Pharo out of the box and it provides native vector graphics… so yes, i am a fan of Cuis.

>Cuis rendering was so much better than Pharo out of the box and it provides native vector graphics…

I installed the stable version of Cuis (7.0) on Windows according to the instructions.

Then I did New morph.. -> Vector Graphics -> Sample04Pacman

Quickly moving the pacman around makes it flicker like crazy and causes render errors (it seems parts of the pacman are not rendered fast enough so it looks like parts of it are missing).

If this is "much better" than Pharo, I am outright curious just how broken Pharo's rendering is.

To be fair, it seems to work for you, so I guess the rendering might only be broken on Windows because they have not implemented hardware accceleration on that platform yet or something like that.

The new redesigned morphic gui system (which was one of the key drivers behind Juan's forking from squeak to make cuis) is FULLY driven by vector graphics.

You can take any element, including any arbitrary window, and scale (or rotate) it to your hearts content, up or down. Smooth as silk.

Re: practicality. Cuis is a ruthlessly simplified smalltalk, so it should be easier to dive into. All ancillary functionality has been modularity out of the base image & into external packages (yes, cuis has a package browser builtin).

One of the cuis core contributers now uses cuis as the main platform for his "Dr Geo" maths teaching program (kind of like a live notebook'ish system for playing with geometry & related maths concepts) - a non-trivial app.

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