> On Oct 21, 2016, at 07:30, Norbert Hartl <norb...@hartl.name> wrote: > > The current (!) complaint is rather based on the fact that everything > regarding the graphics backend, widget and tools appears sometimes as an > indefinite loop of reinventing stuff and improving and never get the job > done. Did I mention 64bit, UFFI,… I'm glad all these topics are worked one > and I see a bright future if half of them are done. But then sometimes it > looks rather dark and the light at the end of the tunnel just went off :)
I feel you. I very much want to use Pharo to build devices from things like Raspberry Pi's, iPhones, and Androids. I need access to native libraries. You can't rewrite everything ever in Smalltalk and I don't really see a good reason to. I've taken about ten years off from doing Smalltalk and I'm trying to get back into it. My interest is piqued because I want to build nice custom systems using the nifty new cheap goodies like Arduinos and RPis and it seems tossing together a full screen Pharo image would be a great way to build these appliances. In that time the story for how to call out to native code has changed...twice. Everything is broken or in flux again. To me, it doesn't feel like there's any more platform to build apps on than there was ten years ago and everything is still "just around the corner". Pharo seem to be an experiment in building next generation programming tools using deprecated last generation programming tools. I don't see a lot of useful programs being built atop it - largely because the base is constantly shifting about. It is disheartening that the Ruby guys can crank out gems with native libraries that compile and work on every platform and pharo is still constantly half broken with loadable native code "doable" but only with great effort. I looked and Moz2D doesn't seem to have a light weight build for Raspberry Pi. Is hitching Pharo to a heavy weight graphics library as a core requirement a good idea? I'm starting to think maybe we need something like Gems for Pharo - dynamically loadable libraries and resources - compiled at install if necessary.
