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Comment by eonil | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

I had a quick look, but I don't see any mention about memory management. Because it must have fully deterministic realtime aware architecture to replace or complement Objective-C, and memory management strategy is one of the most important stuff. If it's based on typical (non-deterministic) GC, then it won't be that much interesting anymore.

Also, I think using `<-` instead of `:=` would be better for a new Smalltalk dialect. With proper editor support, the arrow sign will look far better then colon-equal sign.

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"deterministic [..] architecture"

Yes, important point and one of the fundamental design consideration.

Objective-Smalltalk uses the underlying ObjC runtime, so reference counting it is. No GC, unless you run it on Apple's deprecated GC or GNUStep with Boehm. Your choice.

The "<-" character pair is actually supported, Unicode left arrow would also be nice. As a matter of fact, assignment is not a built-in operator as with Smalltalk, but a family of dataflow connectors that includes constraints.

The right-arrow "->" is also supported for architectural connection, such as when connecting the IN and OUT ports of a flow-based system or up-/downstream composite scheme handlers:

   (ref:file:{env:HOME}/Sites -> (MPWCopyOnWriteScheme memoryCache) -> (MPWSchemeHttpServer serverOnPort:8081)) start:nil.

This creates a web-server with the "Sites" directory of your home directory, via an in-memory cache.

Oh it's getting even more interesting!

Do you have any plan to add hygienic macro and coroutines? AFAIK, coroutines were always supported in traditional Smalltalk, but if you're based on objc runtime, it may not possible. So I am asking this.

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