adventures in livecoding
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This is devastating. :( 😔 Vanessa remains a profoundly strong and joyous presence in my life. The memories abound; the first that came to mind was from ESUG in Prague. The joy of discovery, as she and I got her twist on the Squeak virtual machine working for Pharo and Cuis in web browsers, bringing […]
The Model Context Protocol gives us a way to extend the skills of an LLM, by associating a local function with natural-language descriptions of what it does, and making that tool available as additional conversational context. Once the model can infer from conversation that a tool should be used, it invokes the tool’s function via […]
I’m writing phase four of the Catalyst Smalltalk virtual machine, producing a WASM GC version of the virtual machine from a Smalltalk implementation. WASM GC is statically typed. While I prefer the dynamically-typed livecoding style of Smalltalk, I want the WASM GC representation to be thoroughly idiomatic. This presents an opportunity to revisit the process […]
There’s a long tradition of just-in-time compilation of code in livecoding systems, from McCarthy’s LISP systems in the 1960s, to the dynamic method translation of the Deutsch-Schiffman Smalltalk virtual machine, to the “hotspot” compilers of Self, Strongtalk and Java, to current implementations for JavaScript and WebAssembly in Chrome’s V8 and Firefox’s SpiderMonkey. Rather than interpret […]
I’ve bootstrapped a Smalltalk virtual machine and object memory as a WebAssembly (WASM) module, using the type system that supports garbage collection there. I have two motivations for doing this: I’d like to see how fast it can run, and I’d like to see how it can interoperate with other WASM modules in diverse settings, […]
Tether is Caffeine‘s remote messaging protocol. It enables messaging between multiple Caffeine systems running in web browsers, other JavaScript runtimes, or native apps, using TCP sockets, Web Sockets, or WebRTC data channels. With the Deno JavaScript runtime, Caffeine can run server-side in a Web Worker thread, with the main thread providing a websocket for Caffeine […]
I’ve gotten up to speed on AI programming, and it didn’t hurt a bit. After learning the OpenAI chat and realtime APIs, I’m able to integrate generative AI text and speech into Caffeine. I got off to a good start by adding the ability to evaluate natural language with the same tools used to evaluate […]
I’ve been stumbling toward a “good enough” understanding of Smalltalk by an AI large language model, and Smalltalk tools for integrating conversations into the workflow. So far, I’ve been doing this through model fine-tuning with English system prompts, without resorting to code at all. I’ve been impressed with the results. It seems the pre-training that […]
In Catalyst, a WebAssembly implementation of the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine, there are three linguistic levels in play: Smalltalk, JavaScript (JS), and WebAssembly (WASM). Smalltalk is our primary language, JS is the coordinating language of the hosting environment (a web browser), and WASM is a high-performance runtime instruction set to which we can compile any other […]
After creating a working proof-of-concept Squeak Smalltalk virtual machine with a combination of existing SqueakJS code and handwritten WASM (for the instruction functions), I set about automating the generation of WASM from JS for the rest of the functions. (A hybrid WASM/JS virtual machine has poor performance, because of the overhead of calling JS functions […]
