On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe
<sven@beta9.be> wrote:
On 09 Dec 2010, at 20:39, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:14 AM, stephane ducasse <
stephane.ducasse@free.fr> wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> When I see that. I would really like to see how we can create something around the cloud. We have a lot of assets.
> Does anybody have some interest bootstrapping a business around that?
>
> _very_ �I'd love to do high-quality VM work funded in this kind of context.
Its code generator is naive, the object representation is over-complex, the GC is poor (no incremental mark-sweep), the FFI is weak (no threading), there is no multi-core solution available as yet, there is no 64-bit solution, there is no adaptive optimizer. �While I'm making progress on some of these I certainly don't have enough time to focus on them and would love the chance to do just that, working with people like Igor and Marcus.
I don't think (I am actually pretty sure) that Ruby has a good VM, Smalltalk's is way better (many more decades of experience, from the times when hardware mattered). Up until very recently (and even after the RoR hype started) they had no unicode support and no multithreading. Even now, they always (have to) deploy clusters of multiple VMs to scale. [On the other hand, this makes every deploy better scaleable because they have to do it from day one].
Seaside can do all that too (the scaling/clustering), it is sometimes little things that cause problems. For example, many people have tried but very little have succeeding in building a VM themselves that is as fast as the 'official' ones. Headless support is another one. Better sockets and streaming would also help.
Cloud support is actually lot's of Unix/Linux level work combined with automation. Smalltalk, Ruby, Lisp, Python, Java, .Net or even C, it doesn't matter much.
I fear you're right. �But I'm told that being able to scale is key, and that is in part a VM performance and tuning issue, not just a deployment configuration issue.
�
But don't get me wrong, I do think Smalltalk has an interesting future. It is still one of the nicest languages/environments/IDE's/communities to work in. And Pharo has been a great step in modernizing Smalltalk. And Cog just made everything incredibly much faster.
Somewhat faster :) �There's potentially much more to come.�
best
Eliot
Sven