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"Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell

Strange Loop Conference · talk · Watch on YouTube

Programming language designOperating systems & kernelsC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages

What it is

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN commenters recommend it in Smalltalk and Unix threads as a demonstration of runtime dynamism hiding in native binaries and shared libraries.

  • 2 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2023

What HN commenters said

  1. “5 minutes in and the talk is pretty good”

    Talk by Stephen Kell, giving a face and voice to the article author.

    ElijahLynn, 2016-02 · Recommendation · in “Gdb: Debugging with the natives”

  2. “there's a great video of one of his talks”

    Kell shows altering program behavior dynamically via shared library mechanisms.

    johndoe0815, 2020-07 · Recommendation · in “Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: stephen kell, smalltalk, liballocs, c, unix, ffi

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