Spotted in Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life - Comments.
Anand has offered to start wrapping up all the common C libraries for Cincom Smalltalk if Cincom isn't intending to get on this themselves. Interesting offer, I hope that Anand does get involved in this and perhaps gets compensated by Cincom.
Initial direction Anand?
- LIBC - All the standard structures and procedures that C programmers use all the time
- Win32 - Pretty big job, but someone already figured out how to parse windows.h - so that's a start. This would involve the Windows version of LIBC as well as the Win32 GUI API's, font API's, GDI API's, Socket API's, etc
- Unix Socks - The unix equivalent of Socket API's for Windows. These are reasonably similar, which is why the VM engineers were able to make things like sockets work cross platform originally.
- X11 - The UI for just about every unix variant under the sun.
- One of the many Unix Font API's - preferably one that does True Type fonts :)
- Whatever the heck equivalent on MacOSX for the above libraries
After that, it isn't too much of a job to make wrappers over the comparative libraries in the Smalltalk world to get 'cross platform' happening again. At that point, a giant chunk of the VM becomes obsolete and we've ended up with a much richer set of capabilities. And that's just the start - from there we could have interfaces wrapped up for KDE, Gnome, Objective-C, DirectX, SDL, OpenGL, you name it, it's blue sky. VisualWorks would be as cross platform as there are libraries that work across platforms or work similarly across platforms.
Also, think of it this way - this is a large chunk of the next framework after Pollock done as well. This would be a very big boon for the Panda project, which would then have the job of wrapping up the native calls (or cross platform calls) in to Artists for Pollock.