On 10/29/2010 01:36 PM, Steven Kelly wrote:
To my mind, source code in class files and normal VCS would be doable in Smalltalk, without losing anything major. In contrast, image-based development is a major factor in our competitive advantage, allowing debugging, experimentation etc. It's hard to imagine image-based development with Eclipse or VisualStudio, and implementing Smalltalk on another existing VM is currently too hard, so I'll skip those and focus on the low-hanging fruit.
Which Smalltalks (+/- add-on projects) have code in class files, interface with standard VCS
GNU Smalltalk has code in class files, but this ability is (for now) hampered when you launch the IDE. However, we do have easy to implement ideas on how to allow filing out packages from the IDE (basically borrowing the "package is category" ideas of Monticello). Adding VCS hooks should not be hard. Smalltalk/X had CVS integration too, no idea if it has been updated to something more modern.
and yet still have an image-based, GUI IDE? And for those that don't, how hard would it be to get there?
GNU Smalltalk's GUI is not yet 100% usable, though it's getting there. It has inspectors, debuggers, browsers, SUnit. It needs a bit of polishing. Paolo