Did you know that the creator of Smalltalk , Alan Kay , made Smalltalk not as the ultimate environment but as the basis of future environments?

And it worked Eclipse for instance , the well known IDE, started as a Smalltalk implementation.

I have done something similar with my Python bridge , it allow you to execute Python code from Pharo even using Pharo syntax and if there is an error it fires up the debugger displaying both the Python and Pharo error and even allows you to correct and re execute with ease from inside the debugger like regular Pharo code.

I am not familiar with Glamourous Toolkit but I know moose people use it to build tools that analyze code in other languages like Java.

SmaCC parser comes with a ton of support for existing languages, its what I used for my Python bridge to parse and convert Python data to Pharo ordered collections.

The problem is that building IDEs is a rather painful process, so don't expect a magic button. So yes you can make he Lua IDE, but there is no library in Pharo that will make the IDE for you.

Where Pharo suffers is in the text editing department , we cannot compete currently with emacs and vim but we are improving .

It's possible to unify emacs or other external editors with Pharo. This way you won't have to remake something that already exists and you can use Pharo as an extension to this editors for example for live coding, code analysis, code visualizations, package installation etc areas that Pharo excels at.

Emacs does support communication via sockets you can even take inspiration from Shampoo

http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/

Sky is the limit here, you can do amazing things with Pharo if you have the time and desire.
On Sat, 22 Oct 2016 at 12:48, Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co> wrote:
Howdy,

I am interested in building a Lua IDE using the Glamorous Toolkit. The idea is that the Playground, the Inspector, the Spotter, and the Debugger would all be interacting with an external Lua process instead of running code in the Pharo image. The "under the hood" part of Pharo - Smalltalk code - would be hidden unless specially enabled.

Good or bad idea? Any tips on how to approach this? Has something similar been done before? (Is there example code available?)

Cheers,
-Luke