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ajasmin

I haven't used these in a long while.

Is this a fork? What's Cuis' main selling point compared Squeak and Pharo?

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The history link gives details, but if you want a quick analogy:

Pharo & Cuis both forked from squeak at roughly the same time

Squeak = Debian

Pharo = Arch

Cuis = Alpine

Cuis has rigorously simplified, so its much easier to explore & understand the system - because there's less of it

Cuis's re-engineering of morphic is really quite brilliant. Everything is hardware accelerated vector graphics. EVEN THE FONTS are drawn that way. And they remain crisp even when zoomed (in or out) & rotated.

Pharo does have some cool stuff though. I'd love to see fuel (object serialization) & soil (a fully oo database) ported to cuis. And the big one - seaside

But its not an either-or situation. 99% 9f what you learn & do in one is applicable to the other. But if you're starting out, I would definitely recommend cuis (not implying that you wouldn't necessarily stick with it)

Is the development experience compatible with modern AI-assisted workflows? Coding agents have drastically reduced the entry barrier for playing with software projects, and I can think of some fun ideas for Smalltalk things I've been curious about.

I saw a comment saying it is, and having a coding agent able to modify a running environment is a game changer, but I haven't wrapped my head around that yet.

AI isn't my personal cup of tea, but anyway. There is a monthly "show your cool stuff" online meetup, and the most recent one was directly about one dude using AI to build his own quasi-gnome-desktop-like morphic world within cuis.

https://youtu.be/HPcCg66tdrM?is=ErVqY5BvzofE9uQ4

Is the rendering in Cuis really hardware-accelerated? I agree it looks great but think it's all software-rendered using the CPU.

The first prototype implementation was pure "in-image" smalltalk, but a VM plugin to handle it has been in production use for well over a year now.

Cuis is an environment derived from Squeak as I understand it with all the "clutter" removed. So it is really a cut-down Squeak. Just as Pharo was a cut-down Squeak originally.

For me it was easier and quicker to get something done in Cuis than in any other Smalltalk (Squeak, Pharo, VA, Dolphin).

> it was easier and quicker to get something done in Cuis than in any other Smalltalk (Squeak, Pharo, VA, Dolphin).

Is this a UI issue or library issue? Are the APIs more ergonomic?

It was easier to understand the libraries - for example I could read and understand the WebClient package in a couple of days and use it confidently.

When I got a DNU (does not understand) I could track the error down to at most 3 levels of stack.

That’s an interesting aspect of API ergonomics - keeping stacks short. The other day I argued for a DRY violation because I thought that adding one more indirection would harm readability and that the pattern was easier to understand than a DRY solution.

Cuis is the easiest entrypoint into modern Smalltalk. All the others have so, so much stuff (great stuff, just a lot of it). Cuis takes the approach of paring things down to something minimal. You can understand everything from top to bottom fairly easily.

It looks like it is a fork started quite a long time ago.

https://cuis.st/documentation/explanation/history

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