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With regards to performance, Craig Chambers's thesis on the Just-In-Time compiler for Self proves pretty definitively that a language as (or more) flexible as Smalltalk can be very performant without losing any dynamic properties. It certainly isn't an easy compiler/runtime to recreate for any given language, but it does exist.

It didn't exist at the time you're referring to however, so in that context the point does stand, mostly. I believe there was some form of flexible compiled optimization for Smalltalk (since Chambers's thesis references it as prior work) but I forget when that was and how commonly used it was.


Chamber's thesis was '92 if i'm looking correctly (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/craig-chambers/th...), Ungar's thesis from '86 greatly predates it: https://archive.org/details/ungar-smalltalk


The first JIT was for Smalltalk, running on a 68020 system.


That sounds about right. (Just to clarify, what I was referring to with "did not exist at the time" was specifically Self's JIT and its new techniques.)


That sounds about right. It's very easy to make something resembling a Lisp, and even easier to call the result a Lisp.


DOOM was definitely made with DOS in mind, but it also ran on NeXT from the beginning. It's pretty portable actually. Since you cited Fabien Sanglard, I guess I should mention that his book about DOOM's source code (Game Engine Black Book: DOOM) explains how the portability stuff (as well as almost everything else) worked in great detail.


Several of us would regularly play it in a Chemistry computer lab on SGI workstations. Annoyed the hell out of the students doing molecular simulations, regrettably.


The Build engine's source code isn't enough to port any game running on it, since Build was made as a library (I believe most developers using Build in the 90s didn't have access to the source code).

Also, wasn't there an official Blood port by Nightdive Studios?


It may have been fixed up since but the official ND port had some problems at the time of release (if I remember a civvie11 vid correctly)

edit: just looked it out, it seems this has been address. I'm linking the videos because they're entertaining :D

vid on the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkG29e-nE-A

and the patched version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFUPNlfWiYg


Also, the original build code is extremely hard to read!


Dan Weinreb (one of the founders of Symbolics) wrote a rebuttal to this article in 2007. The comments are also worth reading.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121107150708/http://danweinreb...


It's wonderful when I have to show my ID before I can watch a video of the funny man saying fuck (I'm not kidding, that's sometimes but usually not enough to get it automatically age-restricted).


Why not? That's how proper English text is written. Of course there are many programs that can't handle it properly (or handles it inconveniently) so in practice it might be problematic at times, but otherwise I see nothing wrong with it.


Why compare with English? It's computer domain, it's not a book or a poem. It should be clear and unambiguous.

Caps are annoying to type, and difficult to remember (Do You Caps, or Do you caps, or DO YOU CAPS, etc).

Spaces are nuisances that bring no benefit. At best we should use non-breaking space for filenames, but that would be even more atrocious.


Generally just because typing it out with tab completion in zsh sucks, and I don't see a good solution (if it was solved nicely it'd be solved already)


Using the Symbolics Document Examiner was the best manual reading experience I've ever had


The only notable thing they share is that they were both written in Lisp.


HexstreamSoft is one guy who decided to piss off just about everyone he could in the Lisp community, then his Twitter account got locked and everyone stopped caring.


yes he engaged in some unwarranted personal attacks. i actually hope he is ok though. he seemed like a passionate guy just very misguided. my point about raising this is just to have a high barrier for appearing in that list. i otherwise enjoy the list alot


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