SmalltalkJVM: From dream to …
*
My Smalltalk for the Java Virtual Machine is progressing and while I’m not in the home stretch yet I can see the turn that leads to that stretch ! When I reach that turn I’ll open up the github account for people to download the project.
So what is this Smalltalk for the JVM going to do:
- Provide a Smalltalk-80 implementation that compiles to bytecode
- Provide a command line interactive environment like IRB or Lisp REPL
- Provide debug support (breakpoints etc)
- Provide generators for converting Smalltalk-80 to other languages, like Ruby, Python and Javascript, and to target other VM’s like LLVM and Parrot.
- Provide build tools and libraries to get things done (like rspec, rake, roodi, stunit etc).
- Provide a port/implementation of Seaside !
- Provide tools for bundling your code for deployment to J2EE containers.
If you would like to know more then please drop me a line or follow smalltalkjvm on twitter.
*This image which I’m calling Saint Duke (ST Duke) was done by Tim Cuthbertson, who is not only a talented developer, but a juggler and a 3D artist.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Hi James,
Sounds like an interesting project. I’ll be really interested to see your approach. I presume invokedynamic will take care of the message send semantics. (How) do you plan to provide Exception handing support and Contexts? From what I understand a Seaside port will depend on that latter in particular. Any idea when you are likely to open up the github repo?
Steve
BTW I’m a maintainer for the Strongtalk VM, so this is slightly more than idle curiousity. I also have a bit of knowledge about ST VM implementation.