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GNU Smalltalk User's Guide

5. Future directions for GNU Smalltalk

Presented below is the set of tasks that I feel need to be performed to make GNU Smalltalk a more fully functional, viable system. They are presented in no particular order; other tasks are listed in the `TODO' file, in the main distribution directory.

I would very much welcome any volunteers who would like to help with the implementation of one or more of these tasks. Please write at mailto:help-smalltalk@sc{gnu.org, , help-smalltalk@sc{gnu}.org} if you are interested in adding your efforts to the GNU Smalltalk project.

Tasks:

• Port software to GNU Smalltalk. The class library has proven to be quite robust; it should be easy to port packages (especially free ones!) to GNU Smalltalk if the source dialect is reasonably ANSI-compliant. One area which might give problems is namespaces, which is not standardized, and possibly exception handling for which most dialects have been cooking their own syntax for years.

• Port to other computers/operating systems. The code thus far has shown itself to be relatively portable to various machines and Unix derivatives. The architecture must support 32 or 64 bit pointers the same size as a long integers; in addition, the operating system had better be advanced enough to support asynchronous file polling and explicit allocation of virtual memory address ranges.

• Modify the Delay class primitive so that it does not fork a new process each time it is called when setitimer or a similar function call is not available; this involves using a pipe. I want to do it somewhen, but if you do it before me, please tell me.

• Improve the memory manager. The current one works, but it's not so cunning and does not scale at all when there are many small objects. We really should use multiple heaps each with its own OOP table, and/or use memory locks to implement write barriers for a true generational GC.

• Port Blox to GTK+.

• More ideas are sketched in the `TODO' file, in the main distribution directory.