I asked several smalltalkers why there was no game in Smalltalk. Most of them answered me it was because Smalltalk is too slow to run video game. It may be because of the GC as Lawson English said. If you want to do a game that requires a lot of performance (for example realtime + 3d), you should care. But if you want to do a small game, as the games we can find on smartphone or on website like armor games it is enough.

I don't think that running a Lua script through native Boost is a good idea. It will work, but will be slower than pure Smalltalk. But I'm not a pro :)

2012/12/14 Frank Shearar <frank.shearar@gmail.com>

On 14 December 2012 20:26, Lawson English <lenglish5@cox.net> wrote:
> On 12/13/12 1:58 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>
>> On 13 December 2012 09:54, dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> I was ready to disagree , but you do make a valid point.
>>>
>>> Also going down the pharo route you dont offer games only a better
>>> language
>>> but also a development enviroment and that is a double win. I am suprised
>>> that pharo is not used heavily for games.
>>>
>>> And no I dont believe sandbox is the reason. Afterall python is very
>>> popular
>>> with games too and has no sandbox.
>>
>> indeed, its all about marketing and having 'killer app', and then you
>> wont notice how eagerly new
>> people will jump into bandwagon.
>>
>>
>
> until certain issues with garbage collection are fixed, there will be no
> playable realtime games on any of the OSS Smalltalks.

Details please! Does the time taken to GC vary too wildly, for example?

frank

> L
>
> --
> Squeak from the very start (introduction to Squeak and Pharo Smalltalk for
> the (almost) complete and compleate beginner).
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788D&feature=view_all
>
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by
> definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan
>
>