found a compiled smalltalk, something to consider maybe for future development

[kryton9]

Hi guys, as you know I have posted about smalltalk based languages at coding monkeys. If you can see what can be done with smalltalk and or listen to Alan Kay, you can see the opportunity the world is missing by not going with something like smalltalk.

Anyways the biggest downfall as Petr and I found was its slowness. It runs in a virtual machine as it forms it own ties to the hardware. Really cool stuff for programming and development in a way that is where it should be, but not practical for daily life.

Well I ran across a version that is not free, but it compiles down to a nice executable at nice speeds. I think most of us here are interested programming languages of all sorts and many of you might want to look at this as for something of future use.

I wrote to the company yesterday as one of the links to demo their DirectX wasn't working. I got a reply back today and that is always a good sign in my book.
They will adding support for DirectX 10 too soon.


Hello Kent,
Thanks for reporting th e problem, the link is now repaired and you
should be able to start the demos. Note that you need the Microsoft
DirectX SDK for some of the sample media.

We focused on DirectX rather than OpenGL because the interface is easier
to access from an OO language and because DirectX is more advanced.
We are currently working on a demo for a DirectX9 based game, as well as
on DirectX 10 support. A new version will be out shortly with improved
Vista support and DirectX 10 interfaces.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions.

Tarik Kerroum
Object Connect

Here is a link to the downloadable binary files to see smalltalk MT in action. Could be the nice alternative to Microsoft and Borland for many development projects.

http://www.objectconnect.com/samples.htm

[Michael Hartlef]

We focused on DirectX rather than OpenGL because the interface is easier
to access from an OO language and because DirectX is more advanced.


Their obviously never studied OpenGL enough.

[kryton9]

Mike, yeagh and smalltalk is crossplatform so to go with directx sort of surprised me, the obvious choice would be opengl. I can see how if they are tying to get young programmers, kids getting into programs to make games, then most of them only ever see DirectX so it makes sense that way, that is the only thing I can think why they went that way.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi kryton,

thanks for the report.
I must react on this too:


We focused on DirectX rather than OpenGL because the interface is easier
to access from an OO language and because DirectX is more advanced.

... as both reasons seem weird to me. Access OO stuff from procedural can be hard, but procedural from OO ?
DirectX is more advanced... Oh well :) Neverending 3D API war continues...

Maybe it could be interesting for you, that thinBASIC GLEXT header has %GL_EXT_geometry_shader4. Isn't it a DirectX10 feature ;) ? As I don't have GeForce 8800 or Radeon HD I can't test it now, if you want to read about GLSL and geometry shaders check out this link (http://www.icare3d.org/content/view/50/9/).
Maybe NVEmulate could help to test it on my card, but I think on software it would run too slow.

But it is good to know they have fast replying support :)


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

Thanks for the link Petr. I will keep an eye on MT and tinker with it time to time. As we have seen in the smalltalk videos before, lots can be done, in fact things that look like impossible can be done with smalltalk, but the speed was the issue. Just because it is compiled I still don't know how fast MT is? It would be nice when someone writes an impressive looking game in it to see what it can and perform. Till then I will keep tabs on it, but not go do anything with it.