Sunday, February 2, 2020

This is the day where I give my talk on XL.

Making poetry with Racket

A good talk for a Sunday. Unfortunately, I was a bit late, so I did not see all of it.

James Shubbin

His presentations are always quite funny, and this one was no exception. Also, it's quite the challenge to talk right after he did. I was a bit disappointed he did not stick around to watch my own talk, but oh well.

Forth, the new synthesis

This talk is about a reboot of Forth.

ICE concept: Interpret, Compile, Execute.

• Interpret function arguments
• Compile functions before...
• Executing them

The seedForth accepts source code in tokenized form, and in 550LOC, it is able to compile functions and execute them. Current implementations for 32-bit and 64-bit x86.

Definitions of interpreter and compiler are here:

: interpreter ( -- )
  token execute tail interpreter ;


: compiler ( -- )
  token ?dup 0= ?exit ?lit
  compile, tail compiler

The preForth homepage is there.

Pharo: A minimal pur object-oriented reflective language

A small language inspired by Smalltalk.

Shows a number of small cool things, but suffers IMO from the "everything is an object" mentality of Smalltalk, and I did not see a real guiding structure throught the talk, i.e. what problem is this trying to solve. Show things like "live programming everywhere".

Can develop in the debugger. Hot-plugging of recompiled methods while the program is running.

There are a number of open-source books about Pharo. There is also a MOOC.

LXD for mixed system containers and VM workloads

Another take at running containers in virtual machines.

Uses QEMU to run virtual machines.

Do not have seccomp in the qemu case yet.

GEnerate about 300 images of distros daily.

Demonstrated a container with Windows inside, including graphics. Applause.