7. Future directions for GNU Smalltalk

Presented below is the set of tasks that I feel need to be performed to make GNU Smalltalk a more fully functional, viable system. They are presented in no particular order; other tasks are listed in the `TODO' file, in the main distribution directory.

I would very much welcome any volunteers who would like to help with the implementation of one or more of these tasks. Please write at help-smalltalk@gnu.org if you are interested in adding your efforts to the GNU Smalltalk project.

Tasks:

• Port software to GNU Smalltalk. The class library has proven to be quite robust; it should be easy to port packages (especially free ones!) to GNU Smalltalk if the source dialect is reasonably ANSI-compliant. One area which might give problems is exception handling and namespaces.

• Port to other computers/operating systems. The code thus far has shown itself to be relatively portable to various machines and Unix derivatives. The architecture must support 32 or 64 bit pointers the same size as a long integers.

• Comment the C code more thoroughly. The C source code could definitely stand better commenting.

• Modify the Delay class primitive so that it does not fork a new process each time it is called; this involves using a pipe. I want to do it somewhen, but if you do it before me, please tell me.

• Add more test cases to the test suite. It is getting larger, but one good way to help, and learn some Smalltalk in the process, is still to add files and tests to the test suite directory. Ideally, the test suite would be used as the "go/nogo" gauge for whether a particular port or improvement to GNU Smalltalk is really working properly.