Amber, run Smalltalk in your web browser

Nicolas Petton

petton.nicolas@gmail.com

About me

Nicolas Petton

petton.nicolas@gmail.com

Work @Inria and @Objectfusion

What is Amber?

A Smalltalk

  • Core libraries
  • Web libraries
  • Development environment

Compiles to JavaScript

Written in itself

Amber news

Helios - the new IDE

New GitHub organization & Core team

5 team members

members.png

107 forks on GitHub

465 followers

2500 commits

Showtime

Getting Amber

With Node Package Manager

npm install amber

The latest

It's risky! 

git clone git@github.com:amber-smalltalk/amber.git
cd amber
npm install
bower install

Starting Amber (the server)

./bin/amber serve

Go to http://localhost:4000

Starting Amber (the repl)

./bin/amber repl

Do NOT deploy from master

The new Compiler

  • Better design
  • Inspired from Opal
  • No manual lookup
  • Rely on the JS prototype chain

New architecture

amber-compiler.png

Better inlinings

foo
  true ifTrue: [ ^ self ].


if(assert(true)) {
  return self;
}


foo
  a := true 
    ifTrue: [ 1 ]
    ifFalse: [ 2 ].

if(assert(true)) {
  a := 1;
} else {
  a := 2;
}

Remarks

  • JS proxies
  • Non local returns

AST Interpreter

  • Can interpret 100% of Amber
  • Includes an experimental debugger
  • Much slower than compiled code

Handling Packages

What was the problem?

  • Package loading issues
  • External packages
  • Commit paths
  • Dependencies

The solution

  • Decouple packages from their transport
  • Use an AMD loader (requirejs)

New package definitions

Package
  named: 'Compiler-Core'
  transport: (AmdPackageTransport namespace: 'amber_core')

Amber distributions

They are AMD mobules

  • amber/devel
  • amber/deploy

Loading Amber

<script 
  type='text/javascript' 
  src='support/amber.js'></script>
<script 
  type='text/javascript' 
  src='support/requirejs/require.min.js'></script>

<script type='text/javascript'>
    require(
        ["amber/devel"],
        function (smalltalk) {
            smalltalk.initialize();
            // Custom code here
        }
    );
</script>

Athens on Amber

By Matthias Springer

You can contribute!

Community

amber-logo.png amber-lang.net