LeanQt VS Smalltalk

> Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs?

Depends on the CLA, but generally I do stay away. E.g. I never checked in anything to the official Qt repository because I don't agree the the CLA by QTC. Instead I finally made my own fork and call it LeanQt and LeanCreator (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/).

The "weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage" is likely not even recognized as a true "open source" license.

> would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)

Likely not, because only the IP owner can determine who can do what with their IP under what license. If you use the software of an IP owner under a specific licence, you usually don't have the rights to re-license their work, even if you modified it.

My response to this question was https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt, but I'm not using QML nor xmlpatterns.

I made myself independent of the adventures in Qt Land by switching to https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt.

https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt

A minimum and easy to build fork of QT

If you (like me) don't need all that stuff and are not up to the latest craze, have a look at LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt).

Right. In the Gui module you have everything you need for this: platform independent windows and events, 2D bitmap and vector graphics, fonts and even rich text handling. Unfortunately there are some dependencies in Qt Gui to Qt Widgets, but if you use e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ instead of original Qt these are resolved. So with this you can implement your own widget toolkit on top of the Gui module if you want, and still benefit from the very powerful platform independent foundations of Qt.

> Qt for MCU [..] seems like a big advantage over Qt LGPL-3.0. I have my doubts. MCUs powerful enough to run Qt GUIs smoothly are more expensive than, say, an i.MX6ULL with a Cortex-A7 application processor and Linux. It’s a lot easier to find developers for an embedded Linux system ...

This is a very convincing argument. A Linux embedded system is also more flexible and the degree of code reusability is usually higher.

> Shall we use Qt LGPL-3.0 or Qt Commercial?

LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/) is still available under LGPL v2.1. I will not switch to Qt 6 with my projects.

> * I'm assuming the "by the Bluebook" implementation they're referring to is this: *

Or this: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/

> message passing and late binding combined. "Duck typing" is seriously diminishing it

Actually even ST-72 made synchronous calls, but at least with a token stream interpreted by the receiving object (thus at least a bit of "message passing"). In ST-76 and later versions "message passing" is just nomenclature used by the ST folks for something that is just ordinary method dispatch and call (if you have doubts, you can analyze the innards of the ST-80 VM yourself e.g. with these tools: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk ). The major difference is the dispatch based on signature hash (similar to e.g. Java interface method calls) instead of static positions, which enables late binding (at the expense of performance); and since everything including ordinary integers derive from Object, all values and objects are subject to dynamic method dispatch; it's no coincidence that Smalltalk was the first language to allow real duck typing. The unification of scalar values and references, dynamic typing, and likewise the minimal syntax where control structures are implemented by means of runtime constructs were already known from Lisp; also closures (i.e. ST blocks) were already known before they were added to ST.

Here is one even in Lua: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/

> 10kSLOC for the entire universe

It is the nature of idealists that they see the world idealized. Smalltalk-80 itself has nearly 30 kSLOC; it's just more difficult to count, but I wrote tools which can do it (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/).

Why should "perform" be a message? It's just a method of the Object class, which is the superclass of Integer. You can use my St80ClassBrowser and St80ImageViewer (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/) to check the ST-80 source code and image if you want; there is a list of all selectors and the classes which implement them. Going up the class hierarchy when doing virtual method dispatch is a fundamental concept of all object-oriented implementations; in contrast to e.g. C++ this can be done dynamically at runtime in Smalltalk or Java (which is also called late binding). In contrast to Smalltalk in Java the class loader verifies that a method for the referenced signature actually exists; in Smalltalk you can try to dispatch any signature which can result in a call to the doesNotUnderstand method of the Object class.

> a large lua game code base, over 4000 files, 1.5 million lines of code

Interesting; how do you manage to keep consistency? Do you have special tools to e.g. detect inadvertent global variables? I once wrote a Smalltalk VM in Lua (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/blob/master/Inter...) which is a much smaller code base but even with this size I quickly would have lost track of e.g. scopes and names without tools I had to write myself (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LJTools).

It is true, that there is uncollected garbage in the original Xerox ST80 image. I've built some tools to analyze the image and also a VM which can be interrupted at any time to analyze the current state of the image (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk).

There are two zombie processes (OID 6662 and 19ba). There are also a couple of BlockContext and MethodContext which have a nil sender and a reference to an unknown method, but which are still referenced from somewhere (i.e. the collection is prevented even if it is not implemented by reference counting. E.g. OID 79a2 of class BinaryChoice. I have a full list if anybody is interested.

Integers are actually directly stored, i.e. without boxing/indirection by a pointer. The Smalltalk object memory doesn't have pointers in the C sense, but rather indices into the object table. If you're interested I've implemented a couple of tools to study the original Smalltalk-80 VM, see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/.

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.