Sorry syx people for the double post, I wanted to include help-smalltalk.
Vincent Geddes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Why don't the three of us all support each other in creating a GNOME/ GTK+ IDE and community class library? I think it would be a great folly for each of us to re-invent the wheel. I think its quite clear (to me at least) that merging VM code is not going to happen. I am very attached to Panda, and Luca to Syx. So lets at least rectify the situation above the VM level. I think this is very doable, in the current technical and legal climate. I suggest creating a "GNOME Smalltalk" commons project which will consist of bindings for the entire GNOME stack, as well as a fancy development environment. We could put all sorts of other goodies in this project as well. The bindings FFI/API should more or less follow the GST's implementation (as it is the most advanced). The code would be kept in a neutral repository, under a license suitable to all three parties. I hope GST's copyright assignment still allows for retaining copyright for use in non-GST contexts. The code could possibly be licensed under the LGPL to allow crossbreeding with the strong GST libraries. There is this new tool in GNOME called gobject-introspection. Its primary aim is help create language bindings. For a long time in GNOME, language bindings were third-class citizens, as it was very hard and tedious to wrap GObjects. However, gobject-introspection makes things easier by allowing runtime introspection of GObjects, amongst other things. For instance, Colin Walters did a cool hack in which he generated GTK+ Java bindings at *run-time* using gobject- introspection (http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/19537.html). For GNOME Smalltalk to work, we will need to agree on the subset of our class libraries that need to be compatible with each other. I don't think this should be too hard. As I mentioned to Paolo, I am very interested in Vassili Bykov's Hopscotch IDE (http://gbracha.blogspot.com/). From what I have read of it, their rationale and usability principles seem to be very sound. With that in mind, I am certainly not keen on doing a straight port of the Squeak browsers to GTK+. I get irritated by the modality of the Squeak class browser. For instance, If I am editing a method, and want to quickly view another method, I have to cancel editing. Only being able to view one method at a time is also restrictive. Someone very aptly called it a "pinhole" style of browsing. PS: I called this hypothetical project "GNOME Smalltalk", but we can improve on the name if needed.
Paolo _______________________________________________ help-smalltalk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk
