I just bumped into Microsoft's MIT Licensed IDE "Visual Studio Code" that runs on OSX, Linux & Windows. What is interesting is their Debug Protocol for connecting to language specific debuggers. * https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/api-debugging
If I had time, it would be interesting (and super cool) to build a Debug Adaptor in Pharo * https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/language-support as well as a Language Server Protocol provider * https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/language-support Could make a good student project or two. The skills learnt and demonstrated would be quite marketable outside of the Pharo community. >From a marketing perspective, it might be more palatable for existing Visual Studio users to install Pharo as an extension rather than install Pharo as a whole new IDE (i.e. Pharo) - a common complaint about Smalltalk in general. At a minimum there is the exposure gained from Microsoft's Extension Marketplace, with early adoptors trying out Pharo just-because-its-there. It also smashes that regular criticism of Smalltalk that it lives too much in its on isolated world. It might attract developers wanting to do polygot development, for example (just guessing that might be possible): * game development using Unity libraries for the game engine with Ronnie's minimal-vm embedded as the scripting language, and debugging both in parallel from a single environment * Pharo web server backend with Javascript frontend I vaguely wonder if it would be possible to make a Debug Adaptor that integrates VM & Image level debugging, transparently stepping from Smalltalk into the VM C code. That could be useful for FFI debugging, or developing low-level graphics interfaces that might break our internal IDE. Disclaimer: Like all my random ideas, its a bit vague and dreamy, but I had no concept of it yesterday, so just sharing the find to stimulate future ideas. cheers -ben
