On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 8:30 AM, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote:
One thing Iâm working on is a bridge between Pharo and F-Script. F-Script is, basically, a Smalltalk dialect, as is obvious from the screenshot. However for MacOS and iOS, it allows you to bypass the static Objective-C API interface and debug / modify or even write applications directly in the system. To do that you âinjectâ F-Script into the OS. The ability to so has a specific implication, though. MacOS and iOS are themselves written in and as a dialect of Smalltalk. (were it simply an overlay on Objective-C, it wouldnât be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldnât need to be âinjectedâ in order to run). Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNUâs useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk. No surprise that Appleâs does, as well.
In any event, it will allow Pharo code to be mapped to MacOS and iOS objects, injected into the system dynamically, and modified / debugged dynamically using the Pharo tools. The result, at least as far as iOS is concerned, may make Pharo actually the most powerful way to program it, well beyond XCode alone, along with doing the same for MacOS.
It would be really interesting to see a blog post and/or video of working like this with OS level objects. Also its something that might capture the curiosity of hackers outside the Pharo community. cheers -ben