Preparing for the Smalltalks

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We are looking forward to the Smalltalks, there are plenty of interesting talks this year. And even better than that, there's going to be a lot of people discussing new ideas and projects, a really good opportunity to find out what's going on in Smalltalk world.

Of course, we are very excited to show our work too. Javi B did an excellent job on the slides and I think the talk is going to be great. There are lots of things to show this time and the future shows even more promising, with a huge amount of interesting things to work on.

We are opening this blog to show a bit more what's going on under the hood on Bee development. Stay tuned, and be prepared to visit VM devs' Disneyland.

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Design principles behind Bee Smalltalk's Execution Engine

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I think the strongest design principle behind Bee Smalltalk is minimality. Bee works with a small kernel made of objects (SKernel), and other libraries (also made of objects). SKernel is very much minimal, it just contains basic objects (like the meta hierarchy, collections, streams, FFI and basic OS interaction), and knows how to load more libraries. To understand this, think of a method closure, which is a set of methods that only send messages whose implementations are inside this same set. Other libraries, on the other side, are similar to the SKernel, but they are only partial method closures, as they depend on themselves and also on SKernel or methods already loaded by other libraries. To be able execute code for these methods, their bytecodes are already nativized and included in SKernel. This is done with NativeCode objects, which include a ByteArray with the actual encoded x86 instructions, and are, as every other required object, included in the library itself. SKern...
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Connecting the dots

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We've been working very hard this year. The seed that was planted years ago has been growing underground and we are now starting to see the first leaves pop out. After Smalltalks 2013 we had the chance to stop the ball, have an overview and open to wider perspectives. After some time, we got back to daily work and thought about the current situation and the next steps. We opened this blog to let people know about both the progress of this project and the ideas around it. Now that the year is gone, we'd like to share some overview and vision of the future. We have lot's of stuff going on here and many things almost working that need a last push to get integrated. You know, that 1% boring stuff. We now have this small kernel working with libraries which is the base of the system. We also have a jitter, a garbage collector, and a starting point of a debugger all of them written in Smalltalk , but none of them is plugged yet. So we are asking ourselves, what do we do next,...
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Pre-releasing Bee Smalltalk

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Today marks a key milestone in Bee project: we are realizing Bee main sources and libraries to the public sphere ! Do not get too excited yet. This is stated as a pre-release, because many things are yet missing and as the license is CC-BY-NC (for now). Also, there's no way to browse code like in a complete smalltalk environment, nor to rebuild the kernel. You can consider this as just a small preview of what the system is going to be like internally. There are two kinds of files: SLLs are the binary smalltalk libraries, SMLs contain the source code of their respective libraries. bee.sll is the main executable (it is just an .exe file, you can rename and double-click). In case no arguments are passed, a *REALLY* basic command line interface is shown, where you can enter some Smalltalk code: $> bee Welcome to bee. command line interface is waiting for you > 3+4+5 12 > 3 class SmallInteger > | o | o := Object new. o size 0 If you pass a file, like this: ...
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