Running VA on Linux, current UI status and roadmap [WAS] Re: One-page VA Smalltalk manual?

59 views
Skip to first unread message

Mariano Martinez Peck

unread,
May 23, 2019, 8:36:22 AM5/23/19
to VA Smalltalk

- One thing that surprised me is lack of syntax coloring, at first run. I guess I should load something I am not aware, any tips?


Hi Hernan, 

As you saw, in Linux, there is no color highlighting in the editor. And the UI in general doesn't look sharp. Contrary to other Smalltalks where the rendering is done in Smalltalk itself (like Morphic), the UI in VAST is native. And for Unix we use Motif. 

In the past, we started wrapping GTK but our customers survey showed that it had lower priority than other projects. So it was left behind. For 9.3 we will be revising this once again and see if its worth continuing with that GTK effort. 

In the meanwhile, I have heard of some people having a good experience running with Wine. I tried it myself and did some testing but I cannot say more because I did not test it extensively... just tried a couple of things. To run you should do something like this:

wine bin64/abt.exe -iimage64/abt.icx -ini:image64/abt.ini & 

Then it will look like the attached screenshot (Linux Mint running VA 64 bits Windows exe)

Best, 

--
Mariano Martinez Peck
Software Engineer, Instantiations Inc.
Screen Shot 2019-05-23 at 9.24.26 AM.png

Joachim Tuchel

unread,
May 27, 2019, 10:43:17 AM5/27/19
to VA Smalltalk
Mariano,



Am Donnerstag, 23. Mai 2019 14:36:22 UTC+2 schrieb Mariano Martinez Peck:
 
In the past, we started wrapping GTK but our customers survey showed that it had lower priority than other projects. So it was left behind. For 9.3 we will be revising this once again and see if its worth continuing with that GTK effort. 


This is good news. I hope your IoT / Raspian experiments add enough "pain" to your daily work that you and your colleages clearly see the benefits of such a project ;-)


In the meanwhile, I have heard of some people having a good experience running with Wine. I tried it myself and did some testing but I cannot say more because I did not test it extensively... just tried a couple of things. To run you should do something like this:

wine bin64/abt.exe -iimage64/abt.icx -ini:image64/abt.ini & 

I also heard that and tried and had some trouble with a few primitives on 64 bits. All looked great for the first hour or so but then I had some failed primitives for UUID creation (openSSL?)...
So I can confirm VAST 9.1x64 runs on Wine in KUbuntu 18.04, it seems you need to be prepared to do some DLL tweaking or additional installations or such stuff. If that doesn't scare you, it's most likely the nicest VAST exprience you can get under Linux at this time. Scintilla and syntax coloring are adding so much value to your developer's routine. You don't realize how nice all these things have become in the later versions of VAST until you either have to work on an older one (like 8.1) or on Linux....

So I keep my fingers crossed the evaluation will be a success ;-)

One important thing that cannot be over-estimated: if you have to use external stuff on Linux, developing on Windows and deploying to Linux doesn't really work well. Things like starting external processes, calling out to libraries (especially ones that are not available for Windows) needs a Linux box for development and testing.
I doubt Wine can really help in such areas, because it still is Windows code calling Windows DLLs and not Linux Libraries.

As it stands now, VAST is more than good enough for testing on Linux. Writing lots of code and stuff is not as nice as on Windows, however.

Joachim

Mariano Martinez Peck

unread,
May 28, 2019, 8:02:27 AM5/28/19
to VA Smalltalk
On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 11:43 AM Joachim Tuchel <jtu...@objektfabrik.de> wrote:
Mariano,



Am Donnerstag, 23. Mai 2019 14:36:22 UTC+2 schrieb Mariano Martinez Peck:
 
In the past, we started wrapping GTK but our customers survey showed that it had lower priority than other projects. So it was left behind. For 9.3 we will be revising this once again and see if its worth continuing with that GTK effort. 


This is good news. I hope your IoT / Raspian experiments add enough "pain" to your daily work that you and your colleages clearly see the benefits of such a project ;-)


hehehehe "thanks"
Anyway, let me clarify something: there is no doubts about the benefits of such a project. Many of us at Instantiations do love Linux and OSX.. and use it as host OS and use Windows via VMWare just for running VAST. So, for our daily work, we would love to have a GTK binding. But Instantiations shouldn't spend its money based on the benefits I can see... it should do it based on what customers would appreciate. That's why there have been surveys in the past with customers to see what they would value the most. And GTK binding seem it was never ranked too high. So, as simple as that. 
We may do a new survey at some point.  

 

In the meanwhile, I have heard of some people having a good experience running with Wine. I tried it myself and did some testing but I cannot say more because I did not test it extensively... just tried a couple of things. To run you should do something like this:

wine bin64/abt.exe -iimage64/abt.icx -ini:image64/abt.ini & 

I also heard that and tried and had some trouble with a few primitives on 64 bits. All looked great for the first hour or so but then I had some failed primitives for UUID creation (openSSL?)...
So I can confirm VAST 9.1x64 runs on Wine in KUbuntu 18.04, it seems you need to be prepared to do some DLL tweaking or additional installations or such stuff. If that doesn't scare you, it's most likely the nicest VAST exprience you can get under Linux at this time. Scintilla and syntax coloring are adding so much value to your developer's routine. You don't realize how nice all these things have become in the later versions of VAST until you either have to work on an older one (like 8.1) or on Linux....


Indeed. So far, the only thing I had to do to a vanilla installation is to change the path to the manager...

 

So I keep my fingers crossed the evaluation will be a success ;-)

One important thing that cannot be over-estimated: if you have to use external stuff on Linux, developing on Windows and deploying to Linux doesn't really work well. Things like starting external processes, calling out to libraries (especially ones that are not available for Windows) needs a Linux box for development and testing.
I doubt Wine can really help in such areas, because it still is Windows code calling Windows DLLs and not Linux Libraries.


Sure. But you can still tackle 80% of the development time, right? 



As it stands now, VAST is more than good enough for testing on Linux. Writing lots of code and stuff is not as nice as on Windows, however.



Agreed. That's why we are gonna re-evaluate this for 9.3.

Best regards,

Joachim Tuchel

unread,
May 29, 2019, 2:37:16 AM5/29/19
to VA Smalltalk
Mariano,


Am Dienstag, 28. Mai 2019 14:02:27 UTC+2 schrieb Mariano Martinez Peck:


On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 11:43 AM Joachim Tuchel <jtu...@objektfabrik.de> wrote:
Mariano,



Am Donnerstag, 23. Mai 2019 14:36:22 UTC+2 schrieb Mariano Martinez Peck:
 
In the past, we started wrapping GTK but our customers survey showed that it had lower priority than other projects. So it was left behind. For 9.3 we will be revising this once again and see if its worth continuing with that GTK effort. 


This is good news. I hope your IoT / Raspian experiments add enough "pain" to your daily work that you and your colleages clearly see the benefits of such a project ;-)


hehehehe "thanks"
Anyway, let me clarify something: there is no doubts about the benefits of such a project. Many of us at Instantiations do love Linux and OSX.. and use it as host OS and use Windows via VMWare just for running VAST. So, for our daily work, we would love to have a GTK binding. But Instantiations shouldn't spend its money based on the benefits I can see... it should do it based on what customers would appreciate. That's why there have been surveys in the past with customers to see what they would value the most. And GTK binding seem it was never ranked too high. So, as simple as that.
 
 
We may do a new survey at some point.  

The problem with a customer survey: you get answers from existing customers mostly. They may have chosen to not use Linux for several reasons, one of them being that they thought VAST ist just so much nicer on Windows. The other reason may be that they maintain a very battle-tested system which is not planned to move to Linux, and they may have decided to not use VAST for other projects on Linux Servers because the IDE feels a bit dated there.
I know that in business everything boils down to "how many $$$ will I get beack for each $ spent within a certain timespan?". And this is an extremely hard question to answer, espcially if the timespan is rather short, like a year or two... So I absolutely understand why Instantiations is very careful about this. Spending one or two release cycles on GtK instead of other features is risky.
 
 

In the meanwhile, I have heard of some people having a good experience running with Wine. I tried it myself and did some testing but I cannot say more because I did not test it extensively... just tried a couple of things. To run you should do something like this:

wine bin64/abt.exe -iimage64/abt.icx -ini:image64/abt.ini & 

I also heard that and tried and had some trouble with a few primitives on 64 bits. All looked great for the first hour or so but then I had some failed primitives for UUID creation (openSSL?)...
So I can confirm VAST 9.1x64 runs on Wine in KUbuntu 18.04, it seems you need to be prepared to do some DLL tweaking or additional installations or such stuff. If that doesn't scare you, it's most likely the nicest VAST exprience you can get under Linux at this time. Scintilla and syntax coloring are adding so much value to your developer's routine. You don't realize how nice all these things have become in the later versions of VAST until you either have to work on an older one (like 8.1) or on Linux....


Indeed. So far, the only thing I had to do to a vanilla installation is to change the path to the manager...


I may take a second look later this year. A new development machine, hopefully 100% Linux, is on the schedule...
 

So I keep my fingers crossed the evaluation will be a success ;-)

One important thing that cannot be over-estimated: if you have to use external stuff on Linux, developing on Windows and deploying to Linux doesn't really work well. Things like starting external processes, calling out to libraries (especially ones that are not available for Windows) needs a Linux box for development and testing.
I doubt Wine can really help in such areas, because it still is Windows code calling Windows DLLs and not Linux Libraries.


Sure. But you can still tackle 80% of the development time, right? 

Well, yes and no. There is a certain overhead of having to do 20% of the develoment and testing on the deployment platform. So it's probably 80/40 of 100 ;-)

Joachim

 

Mariano Martinez Peck

unread,
May 29, 2019, 8:06:58 AM5/29/19
to VA Smalltalk



hehehehe "thanks"
Anyway, let me clarify something: there is no doubts about the benefits of such a project. Many of us at Instantiations do love Linux and OSX.. and use it as host OS and use Windows via VMWare just for running VAST. So, for our daily work, we would love to have a GTK binding. But Instantiations shouldn't spend its money based on the benefits I can see... it should do it based on what customers would appreciate. That's why there have been surveys in the past with customers to see what they would value the most. And GTK binding seem it was never ranked too high. So, as simple as that.
 
 
We may do a new survey at some point.  

The problem with a customer survey: you get answers from existing customers mostly. They may have chosen to not use Linux for several reasons, one of them being that they thought VAST ist just so much nicer on Windows. The other reason may be that they maintain a very battle-tested system which is not planned to move to Linux, and they may have decided to not use VAST for other projects on Linux Servers because the IDE feels a bit dated there.
I know that in business everything boils down to "how many $$$ will I get beack for each $ spent within a certain timespan?". And this is an extremely hard question to answer, espcially if the timespan is rather short, like a year or two... So I absolutely understand why Instantiations is very careful about this. Spending one or two release cycles on GtK instead of other features is risky.
 


Yes, that's a good point. Thanks for bringing it into the discussion. 


Another point that I realized is that having GTK binding would also be very nice for IoT where I find myself using Linux all the time. Even though I mostly develop on Windows and then XD to Linux, having a nice Linux experience for IoT would also be super nice. 


 
 

In the meanwhile, I have heard of some people having a good experience running with Wine. I tried it myself and did some testing but I cannot say more because I did not test it extensively... just tried a couple of things. To run you should do something like this:

wine bin64/abt.exe -iimage64/abt.icx -ini:image64/abt.ini & 

I also heard that and tried and had some trouble with a few primitives on 64 bits. All looked great for the first hour or so but then I had some failed primitives for UUID creation (openSSL?)...
So I can confirm VAST 9.1x64 runs on Wine in KUbuntu 18.04, it seems you need to be prepared to do some DLL tweaking or additional installations or such stuff. If that doesn't scare you, it's most likely the nicest VAST exprience you can get under Linux at this time. Scintilla and syntax coloring are adding so much value to your developer's routine. You don't realize how nice all these things have become in the later versions of VAST until you either have to work on an older one (like 8.1) or on Linux....


Indeed. So far, the only thing I had to do to a vanilla installation is to change the path to the manager...


I may take a second look later this year. A new development machine, hopefully 100% Linux, is on the schedule...


That would be nice. 

I may do the same. Maybe I will even directly change the Environments sh so that I am always launching with wine... 

We should write down the issues we found and maybe they are even only a few and fixable. 

Best, 

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages