<<<From: St?phane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>

The fun is important.
What we want is well designed and powerful libraries that enabled people.
For the JVM question: it is a question of resources + the fact that jvm do not really support well some key smalltalk operations.
Now I do not understand why people develop their own vm instead of joining forces.
Doing in the long term something and finishing a task are the most difficult things.
Stef

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Thank you to everyone for your comments. I am replying to Stephane's email, just as a catch all.

I am curious to know more about the limitations in the JVM. My thinking was sparked - in part - by Mark Roos's work on RTalk. I realised, after my post, that he had actually worked the other way around, i.e. I think he built a Digitalk bytecode layer on top of the JVM, rather than compiling to JVM bytecodes.

Either way, what I was vaguely wondering about was how difficult it would be to have a 'compile to JVM' option in Pharo. I could probably live - quite happily - developing in 'real' Pharo, and then deploying an app to e.g. Google App Engine, as a compiled Jar. Obviously, it would be much better to retain all the dynamism of a true Smalltalk environment even when the app has been deployed, but it it gave simple hosting, and scaling, it might be a reasonable trade off.

I agree with Stephane, it would be great for people to join forces around a vm. Would make like so much easier.

Cheers

Andy