On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 6:32 AM, Philippe Marschall <kustos@gmx.net> wrote:
On 06.01.2012 06:41, Gerry Weaver wrote:
Hello All,
Firstly, let me say that I am enjoying Pharo very much at this point. I wish I would have found the time to look at this a long time ago.
I have a few misc. newbie questions.
1. VisualWorks - I am doing a lot of thinking about projects that I could use Smalltalk on. I have a consulting project coming up that might be a good candidate, but I'm sure I would be required to use a commercial Smalltalk version for it. I guess it may be odd to ask about VisualWorks on this list, but I'm not really looking for a comparison to Pharo. What I'm interested in is your opinion of the product. I would like to know if any of you would consider using it on a project. I would appreciate anything y'all could share in the form of experiences good or bad. I am trying to get my hands on it, but Cincom's mail server (windoze) is having issues. I am also having some trouble getting pricing out of them. Anyway, I would like to get your take on the Cincom products.
2. There appear to be some tool choices in the Pharo image. I would like to be able to create a class and it's methods in an editor in one go. I like being able to see all of the class code at once. Is there a way to do this? I just want to be able to type it all in and accept (evaluate?) all at once.
3. I've seen some discussion about images and image sizes. What is the current state of this. Is it possible to strip an image down to just the required components for an application (ie; no world menu, etc.). I would like to be able to run an image that would bring my gui application up filling the image window such that it looks a close as possible to a conventional gui application.
4. I have been reading about something called "Opentalk". It is a way for images to be able to comminucate with each other over the network. I've also seen something callesd "rST" that appears to do a similar thing. In addition, I notice that someone has done some FFI bindings for zeromq. What would y'all recommend as the best option to achieve something like this in Pharo?
5. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the Pharo gui toolkit provides in the way of widgets. Is there a widget gallery type thing somewhere that shows all of them? I know I can play with them in the image, but it would be nice to see a list of what is there with a brief description.
6. I know Pharo doesn't currently support OS threads in an image, but I'm wondering about the FFI. Is it possible to call a foreign function in a separate OS thread or asynchronously in Pharo?
My understanding is with the very latest mt Cog VMs that FFI call-outs happen in a native OS thread. I'm not sure whether the required infrastructure is already in Pharo.
That's the idea in the MT (multi-threaded) VMs. But its not the case in the standard VM. This makes all FFI calls from the VM thread, blocking the VM until the call returns or calls-back. N.B. the MT VMs are not yet production ready.
Cheers Philippe
-- best, Eliot