in my discharge, I have to say that the only reason why the pharovm is not released for iOS is because Iâve been really busy to properly configure the jenkins slave. But you should be able to produce an iPharo vm (is stack, no support for JIT yet) as easy as compiling any other vm. And I know Jean-Baptiste is in his way to revive the Android platform. In general about gaming, I think nothing prevent us to have something like pygame working right now (technically we have all the elements), just that as a community, we usually are more focused in other directions. But Ronnie is finishing his SDL2 work and soon we will have a version of OSWindow that we can actually use (that will lead to another vm-plugin cleanup. but thatâs another story). SDL2 even has bindings for audio, so we could have audio access without the ALSA/Pulse pain we are having this days. With OpenGL/OpenCL support (which is also being made by Ronnie, he) we could even have very fast graphics support without going out the image (well, just to call those libraries). In other order of things (some-kind related) a couple of months ago Eliot told me that he can be in his way to give us an âexecuteOnProcessâ primitive, that would solve most of our parallelisation problems (and Eliot will be probably hating me at this moment, I know he dislike announcements before they are at least started⦠Iâm sorry). So well⦠I think the answer should be: 1) it is possible, 2) but things are poor documented and we need to improve there 3) as being a pioneer in the gaming for mobile area (with pharo), you will need some work. And of course community (and me in particular) is willing to help as much as we can. 4) ⦠and of course since thatâs a non frequent area for us as a community, they will be probably things to overcome⦠but again, they will all be solvable and we are willing to help. cheers, Esteban On 11 May 2014, at 09:39, kilon alios <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
"What does "not support" mean? People have successfully deployed apps on both iPhone and Android. Pharo can not (easily) be developed on iPhone but can be deployed there-on. One can't develop iPhone apps on iPhone. you need a Mac for that. Does that mean Apple don't support iPhone?? "
I think you replied what support means. Support means that there is group of people out there to support you with your problems on that platform. Pharo does not officially release for those platforms and there are only a couple of applications that I know that run on iOS both from the same developer. So pretty much you are on your own.
"I disagree with 4. If graphics are done by external libraries (and note that even BitBlt in Pharo/Squeak is not implemented in Squeak, but in C) graphics can be as fast in Pharo as in anything else."
It should not be a problem for an educational game anyway , I was talking about games that are very demanding graphics wise. In those games most of the code is most demanding anyway and so they use dynamic languages only for scripting game logic .
"IMO this is a /really bad/ answer. There are Pharo and Squeak apps deployed on Android and iPhone. The answer shouldn't be "this is a bad idea", it should be "you can deploy natively like this..., or you can deploy with a native UI and Smalltalk logic like this...". But the answer should never be "this is a bad idea". Alas I don't spend my time deploying apps so I don't know how to do it, only that people have (I have DrGeo on my iPhone). So can those that know please write an FAQ that answers ralph's question? I wish I could :-/"
Well let me put it this way. Its been 12 hours since the OP has asked the question and the only two people who answered the question are clueless about these platforms. I think the situation verifies exactly the situation I was describing in my reply.
"Kilon, please don't take this personally but someone could easily interpret your answer as "you're better off programming in JavaScript. Pharo can't do deployment. " That's both a terrible and an incorrect answer. I hope we can do much better."
I don't take it personally when people disagree with me, I find it refreshing because I may learn something new.
No he cant interpet it like "Pharo can't do deployment" because I already mentioned in my first reply that there are pharo apps distributed on iOS and especially DrGeo is a really nice app that I have used. if he interprets my post "you're better off programming in JavaScript" then yes he would be exactly right. Because that was my intention. I also mentioned Amber that is Smalltalk that compiles to Javascript so I think I did not force him to consider only JS as an option.
By the way I would love to be proven wrong because I also would love to develop for those platforms with Pharo but right now I dont feel confident about it. As you said it there is not even documentation about the process. I remember someone once posted instructions on how to compile Pharo on iOS but people did not show much interest and it just disappeared.
Please prove me wrong !!!
On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Kilon, Hi Ralph,
I wish I could answer with concrete information. But that's not what I spend my time doing. However, I need to correct the impression the following answers give. I think they're discouraging to say the least.
On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 2:03 PM, kilon alios <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote: I am no Pharo expert but will try to answer with what I know
1) Pharo download is 16 mb compressed and 58 mb uncompressed.
and can be stripped. It is easy to get a development environment into 16Mb (e.g. Newspeak). Applications can easily fit in 16Mb. Applications don't need to be deployed with sources or changes files.
2) Pharo is a standalone and as such it does not need installation. Everything you need is in a single folder contained in a single zip with a single download. I dont think you can get any easier than that. So its a single task.
But there are scripts to create platform-compatible installers on Mac OS and Win32 if that's what you want.
3) There are people who run Pharo on iOS like DrGeo. But Pharo does not support those platforms and most likely you will experience few problems with it. So its some extra work but its doable. They do represent a larger market and a very important one I agree.
What does "not support" mean? People have successfully deployed apps on both iPhone and Android. Pharo can not (easily) be developed on iPhone but can be deployed there-on. One can't develop iPhone apps on iPhone. you need a Mac for that. Does that mean Apple don't support iPhone??
4) Again I dont know the issues on those platforms but bare in mid, Pharo is a dynamic language and dynamic language are definetly not a first choice for those platforms for game because they are slower than official supported languages. Those are in iOS ObjectiveC and on Android Java. All that assuming your game has some demanding graphics. For simple graphics with not much animation and such you should be ok.
I disagree with 4. If graphics are done by external libraries (and note that even BitBlt in Pharo/Squeak is not implemented in Squeak, but in C) graphics can be as fast in Pharo as in anything else.
Personally I think its not a good idea, because Pharo does not support those platforms well. I think that in that scenario there is a better alternative , that of Javascript + Pharo. Its possible to use JS as front end and Pharo as backend. If you dont want to code in Js there is Amber. Web apps are quite performant so you will be able to do some really impressive graphics with this recipe. You will be using also technologies that are well documented and well tested.
IMO this is a /really bad/ answer. There are Pharo and Squeak apps deployed on Android and iPhone. The answer shouldn't be "this is a bad idea", it should be "you can deploy natively like this..., or you can deploy with a native UI and Smalltalk logic like this...". But the answer should never be "this is a bad idea". Alas I don't spend my time deploying apps so I don't know how to do it, only that people have (I have DrGeo on my iPhone). So can those that know please write an FAQ that answers ralph's question? I wish I could :-/
Also there are like a ton of game libraries for JS out there. Which will lift the amount of work you will need to do for your game.
Kilon, please don't take this personally but someone could easily interpret your answer as "you're better off programming in JavaScript. Pharo can't do deployment. " That's both a terrible and an incorrect answer. I hope we can do much better.
-- best, Eliot