Blogging back

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Wow, one blink of an eye and around a year passes! It's been a long time since the last post... you'll have to excuse me, but I find it very hard to make a pause to write here when at the same time I'm facing amazing problems such as the ones Bee poses. I'll try writing here more frequently, I hope I'll have the needed will power to keep doing the exercise.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, yes! there's been a whole lot of work done since last year and I'm going show some of the advances in the Smalltalks, which happens to be hosted in Buenos Aires this year. For a while I've been rounding corners of the self-hosted system, implementing missing primitives, working in the debugger, user interface, garbage collection and more. The next posts will describe some of that work, hope to see you soon!


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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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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. SKernel c
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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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