"Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it in Smalltalk and Unix threads as a demonstration of runtime dynamism hiding in native binaries and shared libraries.
What it is
Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ElijahLynn · 2016-02 · on “Gdb: Debugging with the natives”
Lately I have been very interested in putting faces and voices to words. After reading this article, which was over my head but I got a little out of it. I ended up reading Stephen Kell's homepage, which is crazy intense as far as academics go. He had a link to a video of his and I appreciated the quality and now have a face and voice to attach to the article, therefore will probably remember it better. tldr; Here is a video of the same guy who wrote this article ==> [this video] p.s. 5 minutes in and the talk is pretty good.
Recommends johndoe0815 · 2020-07 · on “Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi”
Thanks for the link - that looks really interesting! I will have to give it a try to make some informed statement, but I think it's definitely worth looking at. Some parts of Ruby also seem to be inspired by Smalltalk, so that might be a good fit. There's also a Smalltalk-80 VM by Rochus Keller based on the Lua JIT compiler [8] (and a very nice Qt-based Smalltalk browser), that might also go in the same direction. In general, I think there are two major interesting aspects in systems like the Ruby system browser and Smalltalk. On the one hand one can discover the system - you can dig into the implementation without using a disassembler or reverse engineering - and on the other hand it is pos
Recommends johndoe0815 · 2023-01 · on “Smalltalk-80 on Raspberry Pi: A Bare Metal Implementation”
I can recommend Stephen Kell's publications on this topic, e.g. "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk": [LINK] Video: [this video] More on Stephen's research can be found at [LINK]
Cites mpweiher · 2020-06 · on “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)”
> Smalltalk can be described concisely as a graphical UNIX Or Unix as a closet Smalltalk... "Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell [this video]
Cites carapace · 2023-03 · on “Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon (2020)”
"Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell, Strange Loop Conference, [this video] > This talk introduces liballocs, an infrastructure which exposes the dynamism hiding in the arcane linking and debugging infrastructure of a Unix process, along with a small extension to C toolchains that enables fast dynamic access to data created by statically compiled code. Together they can be said to unleash a "hidden Smalltalk" inside the C and Unix model of programs and processes. Come prepared for a journey that takes your perceptions of the boundaries between dynamic and static languages and turns them on its head.