Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi
In this technical retrospective (2020), @salgernon shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
This is so cool.
We know that smalltalk message passing was inspired by biology, and the ultimate design vision was for objects to be ephemeral machines themselves.
Would it be possible to create a farm of Pis, where some objects were on some subset of them, and some objects on another? Even a simplistic example with two Pis, with the object space split between them? Can we use the network to perform language-level message passing?
Very neat! How much work would it be to write ROS bindings so you could control robots easily with it? Googling around, I found one team that has done it with Pharo: http://car.imt-lille-douai.fr/category/software/pharos/
Author here - happy to answer your questions...
Beware, there's a bug on ARM11-based Raspberry Pis (BCM2835 on Pi 1/Zero/Zero W and CM1) that crashes the VM when executing drawing functions. I'm currently investigating the problem.
Seems like a neat idea. I've always wanted a tiny LispOS or SmalltalkOS that I could carry around and use on a Pi. I just wish it would also have the modern necessities like web browser...etc.
I love the idea of bare-metal ports to the Pi. I saw snakeware posted here not too long ago. Are there other examples? ColorForth would be interesting as well
"Past" submission didn't find anything, but the author had an "Ask HN" the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806323