"Go" Smalltalk

Here's a random thought that I haven't done a lot of homework on but thought I'd throw out there. People are often looking for places that can host web sites written in Smalltalk. Lots of places will give you full access to a machine, but the places that provide a lot of infrastructure tend to restrict things to a couple of platforms.

Google's App Engine is one such platform. It provides a lot of services and scalability, and is free for up to 5 million or so page views per month, which is probably enough for many purposes. But the applications have to be written in Java, Python, or Google's own "Go" language. Go is intended as a system programming language, so presumably has good performance on low-level operations, but offers garbage collection and run-time reflection.

So it ought to be possible to write a Smalltalk VM in Go that wouldn't have the same sort of performance difficulties that you'd get trying to write one on top of, say, Java. And if the garbage collection is at all reasonable it might be possible to just delegate the GC to it instead of writing it as part of the VM. I would think it ought to be not that difficult to, say, adapt Squeak's Slang to emit Go code instead of C, or even to write a simple VM directly in Go.

There are a few difficulties. If you actually want to run on App Engine, it's a restricted environment. You can't write files, you have to use their datastore APIs for anything that persists. You're only allowed to run code in response to HTTP requests. So it's not really what Smalltalk expects, and it certainly wouldn't run the normal development environment easily. The only running code in response to HTTP requests might be an issue, though I'm not sure exactly what it means. Since this is supposed to scale automatically using Google's infrastructure, it might mean that any two requests might go to different running instances and you might get shut down once the request is done. So if you want to save any information between requests it would have to be put into some sort of data store. That's probably not so good for Seaside continuations, although it's possible to serialize processes using VisualWorks BOSS or the new Squeak/Pharo Fuel serializer. Aside: I know I saw something talking about using Fuel for this but can't find the link; this is something that BOSS has supported for many years.

Nevertheless, a Smalltalk VM in Go running on App Engine might make quite an interesting way of deploying at least some types of Smalltalk web applications with excellent scalability and free up to quite a large usage. I wonder if anyone else has thought about this or looked into how difficult it would be or how severe the limitations are in practice.

MacBook Air

The recent trip to Germany with a lot of city-hopping started making me very weight-conscious, so when we decided to replace the 2006 MacBook Pro we went with the new MacBook Air that had just come out. And I have to say it's remarkably nice. The difference in weight really makes a difference, not just when you're carrying it around in a bag, but even in normal use, and it's a very nice and responsive machine. I did run into one issue I hadn't thought about when one of the hotels on a recent vacation only had wired internet in the room (the Air has no Ethernet jack - it's too thin to have room for one) but on the whole I've been extremely happy with it so far.