[Help-smalltalk] License and porting

[sebnozzi]

Hello,

first of all my congratulations and thanks for doing GNU Smalltalk.
I would like to ask some things:
1) License issues. Although the best thing to do is to make a program free
software, is it possible to develop programs in Smalltalk using GNU Smalltalk
and release them under other license? (I don't mean linking the GNU Smalltalk
Virtual Machine to anything, nor modifying this in any way).
2) How difficult would it be to port GNU Smalltalk to another OS, not
directly related to Unix, as BeOS? It has no POSIX threads, for example. Another
POSIX things are lacking too. There is no standard way of doing "mmap"
(although there IS a way, as far as I remember).
3) How are threads implemented? (not so important, but... out of curiosity)

If the answer to 1) is "yes" and answer to 2) is not something along the
lines of "forget it", I would like to make a try at porting GNU Smalltalk to
BeOS. I think with the proper bindings to the graphical part (and other parts as
well) of the API it can become a very attractive alternative for doing
application programming (in BeOS you're pretty much stucked with C++, in which
after knowing Eiffel and Smalltalk I refuse to code... no problem with C
though). Maybe I should begin by stating that I'm not a hard-core programmer, no
kernel guru, no device-driver writer... I mean, I don't have that much low-level
knowledge (no assembly, just notions), but I have average C and C++
knowledge (plus Smalltalk, Eiffel, Java...). Is it enough? On the other hand I 
think
I could learn a lot by doing this and I think... after a while it will be not
as hard as I think, and definitely lot of fun.

Well, hope to hear from you,

Sebastian

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