Skip to main content

Smalltalk Challenge: Post 1 - Installing GNU Smalltalk

That's right... I'm the one who challenged my coworker Josh to open his mind beyond Java by spending time with a new language and blogging about it. l At first I challenged him to learn Oz, a language that combines the imperative, object-oriented, functional, logic, constraint, distributed, and concurrent programming paradigms (whew!). Unfortunately, apparently the 64-bit version of Mozart on Gentoo is broken at the moment and he didn't want to, as he put it, "build random shit on his box." So I proposed OCaml as an alternative. While it may not combine seven programming paradigms, I'm positive functional programming will be enough to show him there's more to life than what Java offers.

In return, for him to accept my challenge I had to agree to spend some time learning a language of his choosing too, and he set the number of required blog posts to 10. That's not too bad in my opinion since I enjoy looking at different programming languages anyway, but 10 posts seems a bit excessive (I would have been happy with 3). His first suggestion was Shakespeare. Really? I made him pick a more serious language, which turned out to be GNU Smalltalk. Yes, let the record show I rejected his first proposal, but he also rejected mine... and also let the record show that I'm not afraid to use a compiler.

My first attempt to install Smalltalk was through apt-get since I'm using an Ubuntu system right now, and of course I met up with the usual Ubuntu package bullshit...
sudo apt-get install smalltalk
E: Unable to locate package smalltalk

sudo apt-get install gnu-smalltalk
Package gnu-smalltalk is not available, but is referred to by
another package. This may mean that the package is missing,
has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source

E: Package 'gnu-smalltalk' has no installation candidate
It was the SpiderMonkey fiasco all over again. Apparently GNU Smalltalk was removed from Ubuntu back in Lucid Lynx. I had to go to smalltalk.gnu.org instead and download the source. In just a few minutes I had a working binary using the usual configure, make, make install mantra.

There was one minor snag during compilation, though. Initially libtool reported that it couldn't find the name of the link library for libc.la. A quick Google search showed all I had to do was remove libc.la and run make again.

Now it's time to learn some Smalltalk!

Update (6/29/11): I was able to compile GNU Smalltalk without experiencing the libc.la issue by running autoreconf -vi before configure.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...
6 comments
Read more

Safely Identify Dependencies for Chrooting

The most difficult part of setting up a chroot environment is identifying dependencies for the programs you want to copy to the jail. For example, to make cp available, not only do you need to copy its binary from /bin and any shared libraries it depends on, but the dependencies can have their own dependencies too that need to be copied. The internet suggests using ldd to list a binary’s dependencies, but that has its own problems. The man page for ldd warns not to use the script for untrusted programs because it works by setting a special environment variable and then executes the program. What’s a security-conscious systems administrator to do? The ldd man page recommends objdump as a safe alternative. objdump outputs information about an object file, including what shared libraries it links against. It doesn’t identify the dependencies’ dependencies, but it’s still a good start because it doesn’t try to execute the target file. We can overcome the dependencies of depende...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Unicode fgetc() in PHP

In preparation for a presentation I’m giving at this month’s Syracuse PHP Users Group meeting, I found the need to read in Unicode characters in PHP one at a time. Unicode is still second-class in PHP; PHP6 failed and we have to fallback to extensions like the mbstring extension and/or libraries like Portable UTF-8 . And even with those, I didn’t see a unicode-capable fgetc() so I wrote my own. Years ago, I wrote a post describing how to read Unicode characters in C , so the logic was already familiar. As a refresher, UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding scheme capable of representing over 2 million characters using 4 bytes or less. The first 128 characters are encoded the same as 7-bit ASCII with 0 as the most-significant bit. The other characters are encoded using multiple bytes, each byte with 1 as the most-significant bit. The bit pattern in the first byte of a multi-byte sequence tells us how many bytes are needed to represent the character. Here’s what the function looks like: f...
1 comment
Read more