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by marianopeck 2158 days ago
That's pretty cool. Congrats to the author!

I'm really interested in these types of topics too, so I'll add some more info to this thread.

I agree that things like Smalltalk could be a great alternative platform for IoT and edge computing. [1][2]

With GPIO access [3], very cool debugging abilities [4], and some capabilities for on-device AI/ML with TensorFlow [5], Smalltalk already has some real potential in this area. I've even tried Smalltalk on Amazon AWS (ARM) and it worked really well there too [6] with the ability to make a Docker Swarm if desired [7].

Full disclosure, I work with Instantiations (the company that develops VA Smalltalk), and they have developed a really cool VM that runs on ARM. Their interpreter VM is working on both ARM 32 / ARM 64 platforms at this point, and we've been doing a lot of testing of the LLVM-based VM with JIT compiler, PICs, and everything. And yes, it works for ARM v6, v7 and v8 so far. Small runtime images (around 1MB) or even the full blown VM with full IDE/language can be run on Linux ARM platforms (not bare metal yet...but maybe at some point.)

Feel free to reach out to me for more details or discussion.

Keep up the good work!

[1] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/why-is-smalltalk-a-good-fit-for-...

[2] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/sensor-process-and-transparently...

[3] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/accessing-raspberry-pi-gpios-wit...

[4] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/it-s-2019-stop-reading-text-and-...

[5] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/getting-started-with-nvidia-jets...

[6] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/deploying-vasmalltalk-on-amazon-...

[7] https://dev.to/martinezpeck/docker-swarm-cloud-on-a-arm64-di...