X & The Future

[R James Noble <kjx@comp.vuw.ac.nz>]

Some general comments regarding the message in the last few days...

Bay Chang wrote:

> But as I said above, if you want to use X or XGL, the current Self
> system lets you go right ahead and glue in the primitives dynamically.

As I think most of you know, I've been doing this for a while now,
gluing in Xlib and then writing Self code on top of it. Works fine,
and is quite easy to add new bits and pieces as you go along. I
haven't tried gluing in a toolkit, partly because I'm not sure how
well most toolkits event and memory models would co-exits with Self,
and also because my ego wanted to write it's own toolkit :-)

Actually, I've been doing a few progam visualistion type of things,
rather than toolkit buttons/widgets (when I've been finding the time
to do anything at all). But it all hangs together, with no pixrects
anywhere in sight. Also, I have a earlier version that actually taked
directly to X over TCP, which I think a couple of people have played
with. (BTW - Michael - how have you got on with it? Anything going?)

And John Maloney wrote:

>  We are hoping to move to a more "image" based programming model, as
> in Smalltalk, versus our current text-file based model.

One thing I've been thinking about is putting a full Smalltalk like
progamming environment onto Self. I'm not going to have the time to do
this soon, however. But one problem then is how on maintains the
changes to the system made internally, rather than editing the source
code. Certainly going to "images" will make this much easier.

> We are now going to do research for at least a year before
> we even think about doing another release.

Well, thats nice to know. Perhaps I'll even finish something before
the next release!

kjx