Musing out loud... [Why not Smalltalk?]

[Keith Ray]

In article <99cdje$cmv$1 at news.cs.tu-berlin.de>, marcel at cs.tu-berlin.de 
(Marcel Weiher) wrote:

[...]
> >> Basing the Smalltalk runtime on the Objective-C runtime then
> >> gives you 0-cost 'bridging' between the two.
> 
> >How feasible is that?
> 
> I think it's pretty feasible.
> 
> > Is there anything that ST requires from its
> >runtime that the Obj-C runtime can't do?
> 
> Not really.  There are a couple of stumbling points right now, but
> nothing that couldn't be fixed:
> 
[...]
> 
> Nothing that's unfixable, but a lot of stuff, which keeps me thinking
> whether a tiny custom Smalltalk implementation that just sits on top
> of ObjC wouldn't be easier...

This is very interesting. I'm really interested in a 'unified' OO 
runtime for Objective C, Smalltalk, Java, and Python. 

Since Apple Objective C runtime is now open source (in Darwin) and 
Apple's Objective-C to Java bridge is open source (also in Darwin), and 
Squeak is open source, and Python is open source (and Jython -- Python 
implemented in Java), I certainly would like to see an open-source 
unification happen on MacOS X and other platforms (including MacOS 9 if 
something could be done in the short term.)

-- 
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