RTALK - A Smalltalk 'Live' Environment
summary
RTALK is a Smalltalk-like live environment implemented on the JVM that runs an instance-based editor, inspector and debugger and exports code as text. It uses method handles/invoke-dynamic for on-the-fly method replacement and a custom JVM TI wrapper to inspect heap and stack frames, suspend threads and drop Java exceptions into the Smalltalk debugger. Performance: simple Hanoi 25 runs ~151 ms in Java, ~250 ms in classic Smalltalk, ~960 ms in RTALK; a full customer workflow is ~95 s versus 36 s native. Java parts and MIT-licensed sources are on the project wiki.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Smalltalk live environments
- 1:24Forking Smalltalk into RTalk
- 3:56Smalltalk’s Dynabook roots
- 6:23Everything is an object
- 9:15Live programming vs IDEs
- 11:23Requirements for live JVM Smalltalk
- 13:28Inspectors and live objects
- 15:12Code editing and reflection
- 16:22Debugger in the environment
- 18:51Profiling with method handles
- 19:34Performance benchmarks
- 21:44RTalk state and future
