People at least played around with that as a research project. There's one that showed up at the Camp Smalltalks I went to, with a weird-but-sensible sounding name. (Weird enough I can't remember the name.)
There would have been great utility in such a thing. For one thing, the debugger in Smalltalk is just another Smalltalk application. So what happens when you want to debug the debugger? Make a copy of the debugger's code and modify the debugger hooks so that when debugging the debugger, it's the debugger-copy that's debugging the debugger. With multi-image Smalltalk, you could just have one Smalltalk image run the debugger-copy without doing a bunch of copy/renaming. (Which, I just remembered, you can make mistakes at, with hilarious results.)
If you do the hacky shortcut of implementing one Smalltalk inside another Smalltalk (Call this St2), then the subset of objects that are the St2 objects can act a bit like a separate image. In that case, the host Smalltalk debugger can debug the St2 debugger.
When I bring up Smalltalk, I get an all-in-one environment from the image I load. Its live and any code I add goes into that image. Now I can use code control and build specific images, but it pretty much is a one image at a time world.
What I'm talking about is loading up multiple images into the same IDE and run them like fully separate images with maybe some plumbing for communication and code loading between them. You can sorta pull that stunt by, as stcredzero mentioned, running Smalltalk in Smalltalk, ut I want separate images.
In this example on Ubuntu "visual" is the name of the VM file, and there are 2 different image files with different code in them "visualnc64.im" and "quad.im".
That's created 2 separate OS processes, each OS process is running an instance of the Smalltalk VM, and each Smalltalk VM opened a different Smalltalk image containing different code.
I’m not sure if we are talking past each other or you are ignoring the whole IDE thing. Yes, I can run multiple VMs on the same machine, but you are missing that I want to spin up these VMs in my Smalltalk IDE and not via some terminal launch script. I want my environment there for me to edit and debug code. I’m pretty sure you cannot do that in VisualWorks.
> I want my environment there for me to edit and debug code
Both of those instances of the Smalltalk VM, the one in OS process 8689 and the one in OS process 8690, are headfull — they both include the full Smalltalk IDE, they are both fully capable of editing and debugging code.
(There's a very visible difference between the 2 Smalltalk IDEs that opened on my desktop: visualnc64.im is as-supplied by the vendor; quad.im has an additional binding for the X FreeType interface library, so the text looks quite different).
(iirc Back-in-the-day when I had opened multiple Smalltalk images I'd set the UI Look&Feel of one to MS Windows, of another to Mac, of another to Unix: so I could see which windows belonged to which image.)
Yeah, but they are 2 IDEs not a single IDE. You are running two copies not one copy with two instances. I then need to jump between programs to edit code.
So when I asked "What will that let you do?", the only "benefit" you-can-think-of is the possibility of switching from editing code in visualnc64.im to editing code in quad.im without a mouse-click ?
So when I asked "What will that let you do?", the only "benefit" you-can-think-of is the possibility of switching from editing code in visualnc64.im to editing code in quad.im without a mouse-click?
No, that would not be enough to make anything work. What I can think of is an IDE that had access to all the VMs running and some plumbing for the VMs to communicate. I would love to be able to spin-up Smalltalk VMs so I can simulate a full system on my desk. Having separate IDEs running means I don't have any integration so I have to debug in multiple different IDEs when tracing communications. I can imagine some of the debugging and code inspection that could be extended to look at code running simultaneously in multiple VMs.
