Andy, On 22 Dec 2013, at 18:38, Andy Burnett <andy.burn...@knowinnovation.com> wrote:
> I am sure it would be a huge amount of work, and may not be a good idea at > all. > > However, given the number of dynamic languages that now compile to JVM > byte codes, I am curious whether there is anything about Pharo that > would make this impossible? > > Cheers > Andy This is a complex subject area which touches on many things/issues. I am not capable of producing a good writeup, but I’ll try to give some kind of answer. It is really hard to define what makes Pharo (or Smalltalk) unique compared to so many other environments. As you know, it is the special combination of language, library, IDE and VM that constitutes the real magic: a live, dynamic, late bound language with meta level capabilities, including many libraries, frameworks and tools, written in itself. Like with Lisp, many/most of the features of Smalltalk can be found here and there in other languages. Like with Lisp, there are many implementations of some kind of Lisp/Smalltalk. This has all been done before. Moving Pharo (or Smalltalk) away from its own VM is certainly possible (up to a point), but the question is: is it still the same thing ? If you can no longer write your own debugger implemented in the same language ? If you cannot read code all the way down ? Regards, Sven
