Hi Torsten, Phil, On Thu, 2014-09-04 at 14:18 +0200, Torsten Bergmann wrote: > Hi Phil, > > if there is something I would like to see our Pharo ecosystem and ST in > general moving > towards is to such a "multilanguage"/"multisourcecode"/"flexible ressources" > kind of > thing. Even when this could not be a short term goal I would like to see this > in the long term.
I've been working in this area for many years now. And have learned a good deal while doing that :-) Making one language to execute within other's environment is the easy part, though it could be a lot of work (especially, if you care about performance). Making tools to be aware of different languages is not hard too, thought it is "just" a huge amount of work that has to be done. The tricky part is to allow one to talk to each other, preserving each other's semantics and still stay intuitive, clear and free of unnecessary boilerplate code. Another tricky bit is to make other workflows and ways of coding things in other languages work nicely with the way Smalltalk way we do it in Smalltalk. These are tough bits. That's where a real research has yet to be done... > - running Java inside of Smalltalk/X Well, Smalltalk/X can do much more with Java than "just" run it. Java has been fully integrated into development tools supporting full development cycle :-)
