Thanks for sharing! It is very interesting. 🙂 At some it is quite sure that I will have to do things like that.

Great demo video!

Charlie Roberts I will take a look at CodeMirror. Did you write about the visual editor for Gibber somewhere? I did a quick search on articles to reference to compare with Gibber's editor, and I found two of your papers on Gibber, but they don't seem to mention it (at first glance).

Sol Bekic yeah, there’s a few references that touch on this. The best is probably an interactive web essay that I presented at SPLASH in 2018: https://charlieroberts.github.io/annotationsAndVisualizations/index.html

Works best in Chrome. There’s a bibliography at the bottom of that essay that has links to more references. The 2015 NIME paper was the first description of the work and also discusses some other features that are kinda fun, like using font characteristics to convey signal information. The journal paper is basically a short artist statement about using these annotations in performance… happy to send it to you (and anyone else) if you don’t have access and want a copy.

I just downloaded it and am going through the tour. It put me in a blank page and I have to click the burger menu on the bottom right everytime I want to switch pages. Is there some other way that I'm missing? Thank you!

There are arrows on the right / left

I did see those but they seemed greyed out and I couldn't click them. But I'll check again in a few hours. Thanks!

yes, we need to make them respond to hover

Oh you're right! I guess I never actually tried clicking on them. Thank you!

Windows support is good news. Is 3D graphics support in the roadmap?

Thank you for trying Kartik Agaram 🙂

Doug Moen what specifically do you mean by 3D graphics support?

You've said that it is possible to use GT as an IDE for programming languages other than Smalltalk. My language, Curv, is a DSL for constructing interactive 2D and 3D animations. So I am investigating whether it is possible to use GT as an IDE for Curv.

One requirement is to be able to inspect Curv values (eg, inspect the value of a variable). A value in Curv may be an interactive 3D animation. I would also like to be able to construct documentation for Curv using GT, and embed Curv interactive animations within this documentation, in the manner of "explorable explanations" or "The Book of Shaders".

So the basic requirement is to be able to embed interactive 3D graphics directly in a GT window or document, rather than use a Pharo plugin that invokes the operating system to open a separate 3D graphics window outside of Pharo.

Performance is also important. I need to use the GPU to render 3D graphics to get sufficient performance for interactive frame rates. I don't want interaction to be laggy, so I'd prefer to get the pixels from the GPU frame buffer into the Pharo window in the most direct way possible.

Is support for this something you would like to see in GT in the future? If so, do you have a preferred technical approach for how you would like to get there?

Doug Moen Excellent use case!

First, about supporting other languages (or combination of languages). Indeed, that is exactly what GT is primarily conceived for. If you have a grammar, adopting it in an editor is straightforward. Connecting to the runtime will take a bit more work, but it is certainly possible already.

Second, related to rendering. Indeed, we moved the rendering to be based on compositing render layers which allows us to split the scene and send it to either CPUs or GPUs. The goal here is indeed to host other renderings. The underlying rendering is based on Skia. We already use this mechanism to have parts of the drawing do not even get into the Pharo image. For example, a picture goes directly through Skia and get composed into the larger scene.

So, the plumbing should be in place.

Kartik Agaram we addressed the slideshows button highlight issue: https://github.com/feenkcom/gtoolkit/issues/1373

@Tudor Girba I want to understand how rendering works in GT.

Currently, I use OpenGL. I obtain an OpenGL context from the operating system's window manager (Linux, MacOS, Windows), and render my scene to the GPU frame buffer associated with that context. All desktop operating systems now use compositing window managers that allow clients to render graphics into GPU framebuffers. These buffers are then composited within the GPU by the window manager. Crucially, it is not necessary to copy the contents of a Curv GPU framebuffer into CPU memory and then back into the GPU on every frame. All pixel data stays in the GPU.

So, I hope that GT has or will have the same architecture. I can ask GT for an OpenGL context, then render animated graphics into that context in a loop that runs 60 times per second within my code, and my GPU framebuffer is composited with other framebuffers within the GPU to construct the image that appears in a Pharo window. There is also a queue of input events (mouse, keyboard) that my render loop (written in C++) can read while animating some interactive graphics.

That’s exactly what I wanted to describe above. This is already the architecture of GT.

Thanks, that sounds promising. Apple will probably drop support for OpenGL next year and force people to use Metal. I am thinking about migrating from OpenGL to Google's Dawn library, which implements the WebGPU API on many platforms. This would mean that I would be using Metal on MacOS, DX12 on Windows and probably Vulkan or maybe OpenGL on Linux. And that means I would need the ability to ask GT for Metal, DX12 and Vulkan rendering contexts. Is that a problem? Are you limited by the GPU API support in Skia?

Dark for the win 🙂 But I think maybe these icons need a refresh for dark mode; I find the white a bit jarring in that mode.

yes, the -light classes are two "light", will see what I can do

maybe gray, but that color usually means "disabled"

I'd probably make the backgrounds 'dark' or the same black, but change the icon graphic to use a lighter color, or a even dark-friendly colors

That's what Microsoft does in VC ^

makes sense, light on light theme blends with the background, the same should happen on dark theme

🙂 Nice

Are you using FontAwesome for your icons?

Reason I ask, they look a little soft round the edges; like they are bitmaps and not vectors. Might just be how you captured them though.

glyphicons, I'm using the svgs, so maybe the browser or the compression

slack is really bad about preserving image quality in my experience

• you should have line numbers printed next to the code if you’re going to reference code by line number—there’s some ambiguity in the motivating example as to whether “line 1” means let mut v = or let x =.
• i’m kind of a dumbass about rust, so more code comments would be helpful for people who (like me) haven’t bothered to learn the syntax (depends on your intended audience)
• it might be helpful to reference some of the literature on programming education specifically dealing with (i think they’re referred to as) cognitive schemas (sorry i can’t find the paper i’m thinking of atm)
• this seems like the type of thing language designers should absolutely be thinking about. i don’t know much about rust and haven’t learned about the borrow checker but this seems like a pretty solid intro

Thanks Garth Goldwater! That’s all super helpful feedback.

4 pages in, and I've already had half a dozen "aha"s. 👍 👍