ESUG in: 2011 on: Edinburgh

ESUG 2011 is over, and I'm back from my holidays, with a couple of interesting bits about the smalltalk world, and lots of energy.

Here are the talks that impressed me most:

- Martin McClure explained Maglev smalltalk to ruby ffi. It seems maglev is more than a simple smalltalk vm. In fact it runs ruby code and smalltalk code seamlessly (at least, that's what I understood). Unfortunately, it only exist in 64-bit shape, so I couldn't try it myself. The core of the presentation though was the nice FFI that VMWare guys (former GemStoners) prepared to run Ruby code from Smalltalk.

As most of you know, Ruby is heavily influenced by smalltalk. In fact, so much that Martin and friends were able to make one object for both worlds. So String class is the same for ruby and smalltalk. Objects are the same, but the names are different, so SmallInteger for smalltalk, is fixnum for Ruby. 'super' pointer is also different, enabling to build variations in hierarchies and supporting singleton classes for ruby.

Lots of nice tricks that enable us to use ruby objects as smalltalk ones.

- Bifrost. Jorge Ressia is implementing great improvements in the reflexivity side of Pharo. Being able to treat data as code is one of the aims of bifrost. Not losing the link on logs and where a log entry comes from, or being able to hook on variable usage when debugging... Thanks to Bernat I was able to try it in my own pharo image. (Bifrost is only the framework, you have to install the programs separately)

- Jtalk. I think this was the killer talk of this ESUG. Goran Krampe and Nicolas Petton presented their (mostly Nico's) smalltalk implementation in js. Running smalltalk in browser is not only being able to write smalltalkish syntax. It means you have a full stack smalltalk in your browser. Many firebug features will come for free in Jtalk. Goran showed some experiments he's doing with node.js and jtalk compiler to js. Yes, you're able to write smalltalk for the server side. Probably I'll post more about jtalk, so keep tunned.

There were a lot of other interesting presentations, like Gerardo and Javier live garbage collection tweaks(writing garbage collectors in smalltalk and rebinding garbage collector on your live system), redline (smalltalk in your jvm) and Coral (pharo for those who can type).

It's great stuff all way down!