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112-450: The Java HotSpot Performance Engine was released on April 27, 1999, built on technologies from an implementation of the programming language Smalltalk named Strongtalk , originally developed by Longview Technologies, which traded as Animorphic. The Longview virtual machine was based on the Self virtual machine, with an interpreter replacing the fast-and-dumb first compiler. When Sun cancelled

224-472: A high-level language implementation of Unix made its porting to different computer platforms easier. Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, AT&T licensed the operating system's source code as a trade secret to anyone who asked. As a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of its regional operating companies , and

336-424: A minimalist functionality, while more elaborate window managers such as FVWM , Enlightenment , or Window Maker provide more features such as a built-in taskbar and themes , but are still lightweight when compared to desktop environments. Desktop environments include window managers as part of their standard installations, such as Mutter (GNOME), KWin (KDE), or Xfwm (xfce), although users may choose to use

448-516: A solution stack such as LAMP . The source code of Linux may be used, modified, and distributed commercially or non-commercially by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). The license means creating novel distributions is permitted by anyone and is easier than it would be for an operating system such as MacOS or Microsoft Windows . The Linux kernel, for example,

560-412: A string literal . For example: If the sequence does not include whitespace or punctuation characters, this can also be written as: Arrays: defines an array of four integers. defines a seven element array whose first element is a literal array, second element a byte array, third element the string 'four', and so on. Many implementations support the following literal syntax for ByteArrays: defines

672-455: A ByteArray of four integers. And last but not least, blocks ( anonymous function literals) Linux This is an accepted version of this page Linux ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / , LIN -uuks ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel , an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds . Linux

784-462: A class's method dictionary. The part of the class hierarchy that defines classes can add new classes to the system. The system is extended by running Smalltalk-80 code that creates or defines classes and methods. In this way a Smalltalk-80 system is a "living" system, carrying around the ability to extend itself at run time. One can even extend the compiler at run-time; indeed this is how the Compiler

896-460: A code snippet by Ralph Johnson , demonstrating all the basic standard syntactic elements of methods: The following examples illustrate the most common objects which can be written as literal values in Smalltalk-80 methods. Numbers. The following list illustrates some of the possibilities. The last two entries are a binary and a hexadecimal number, respectively. The number before the 'r'

1008-470: A competing OS, agrees that "Linux wasn't designed, it evolved", but considers this to be a limitation, proposing that some features, especially those related to security, cannot be evolved into, "this is not a biological system at the end of the day, it's a software system." A Linux-based system is a modular Unix-like operating system, deriving much of its basic design from principles established in Unix during

1120-654: A configurable invocation-count threshold to decide which methods to compile. Tiered compiling, an option introduced in Java 7, uses both the client and server compilers in tandem to provide faster startup time than the server compiler, but similar or better peak performance. Starting in Java 8, tiered compilation is the default for the server VM. HotSpot is written in C++ and Assembly. In 2007, Sun estimated it comprised approximately 250,000 lines of source code. Hotspot provides: HotSpot supports many command-line arguments for options of

1232-974: A different window manager if preferred. Wayland is a display server protocol intended as a replacement for the X11 protocol; as of 2022 , it has received relatively wide adoption. Unlike X11, Wayland does not need an external window manager and compositing manager. Therefore, a Wayland compositor takes the role of the display server, window manager, and compositing manager. Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, while GNOME's Mutter and KDE's KWin are being ported to Wayland as standalone display servers. Enlightenment has already been successfully ported since version 19. Additionally, many window managers have been made for Wayland, such as Sway or Hyprland, as well as other graphical utilities such as Waybar or Rofi. Linux currently has two modern kernel-userspace APIs for handling video input devices: V4L2 API for video streams and radio, and DVB API for digital TV reception. Due to

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1344-469: A larger program of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded research that in many ways defined the modern world of computing. In addition to Smalltalk, working prototypes of things such as hypertext , GUIs, multimedia , the mouse, telepresence , and the Internet were developed by ARPA researchers in the 1960s. Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk) also described a tablet computer he named

1456-648: A number of facilities such as distributed Smalltalk where messages are exchanged between multiple Smalltalk systems, database interfaces where objects are transparently faulted out of a database, promises , etc. The design of distributed Smalltalk influenced such systems as CORBA . Smalltalk-80 syntax is rather minimalist, based on only a handful of declarations and reserved words. In fact, only six "keywords" are reserved in Smalltalk: true , false , nil , self , super , and thisContext . These are properly termed pseudo-variables , identifiers that follow

1568-404: A place in server installations such as the popular LAMP application stack. The use of Linux distributions in home and enterprise desktops has been growing. Linux distributions have also become popular in the netbook market, with many devices shipping with customized Linux distributions installed, and Google releasing their own ChromeOS designed for netbooks. Linux's greatest success in

1680-502: A popular CLI shell. The graphical user interface (or GUI) used by most Linux systems is built on top of an implementation of the X Window System . More recently, the Linux community has sought to advance to Wayland as the new display server protocol, in place of X11. Many other open-source software projects contribute to Linux systems. Installed components of a Linux system include the following: The user interface , also known as

1792-481: A significant business around Linux distributions. The free software licenses , on which the various software packages of a distribution built on the Linux kernel are based, explicitly accommodate and encourage commercialization; the relationship between a Linux distribution as a whole and individual vendors may be seen as symbiotic . One common business model of commercial suppliers is charging for support, especially for business users. A number of companies also offer

1904-493: A specialized business version of their distribution, which adds proprietary support packages and tools to administer higher numbers of installations or to simplify administrative tasks. Another business model is to give away the software to sell hardware. This used to be the norm in the computer industry, with operating systems such as CP/M , Apple DOS , and versions of the classic Mac OS before 7.6 freely copyable (but not modifiable). As computer hardware standardized throughout

2016-457: A spelling corrector. Each release consisted of a virtual image (platform-independent file with object definitions) and a virtual machine specification. ANSI Smalltalk has been the standard language reference since 1998. Two currently popular Smalltalk implementation variants are descendants of those original Smalltalk-80 images. Squeak is an open source implementation derived from Smalltalk-80 Version 1 by way of Apple Smalltalk. VisualWorks

2128-514: A string: Two equal strings (strings are equal if they contain all the same characters) can be different objects residing in different places in memory. In addition to strings, Smalltalk has a class of character sequence objects named Symbol. Symbols are guaranteed to be unique—there can be no two equal symbols which are different objects. Because of that, symbols are very cheap to compare and are often used for language artifacts such as message selectors (see below). Symbols are written as # followed by

2240-972: A system's software from one central location. A distribution is largely driven by its developer and user communities. Some vendors develop and fund their distributions on a volunteer basis, Debian being a well-known example. Others maintain a community version of their commercial distributions, as Red Hat does with Fedora , and SUSE does with openSUSE . In many cities and regions, local associations known as Linux User Groups (LUGs) seek to promote their preferred distribution and by extension free software. They hold meetings and provide free demonstrations, training, technical support, and operating system installation to new users. Many Internet communities also provide support to Linux users and developers. Most distributions and free software / open-source projects have IRC chatrooms or newsgroups . Online forums are another means of support, with notable examples being Unix & Linux Stack Exchange , LinuxQuestions.org and

2352-525: A toolkit for developing collaborative applications Croquet Project , and the Open Cobalt virtual world application. GNU Smalltalk is a free software implementation of a derivative of Smalltalk-80 from the GNU project. Pharo Smalltalk is a fork of Squeak oriented toward research and use in commercial environments. As of 2016, a significant development that has spread across all Smalltalk environments

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2464-402: A user may interact with the application; however, certain extensions of the X Window System are not capable of working over the network. Several X display servers exist, with the reference implementation, X.Org Server , being the most popular. Server distributions might provide a command-line interface for developers and administrators, but provide a custom interface for end-users, designed for

2576-453: A vast body of work and may include both kernel modules and user applications and libraries. Linux vendors and communities combine and distribute the kernel, GNU components, and non-GNU components, with additional package management software in the form of Linux distributions. Many developers of open-source software agree that the Linux kernel was not designed but rather evolved through natural selection . Torvalds considers that although

2688-517: Is a structurally reflective system which structure is defined by Smalltalk-80 objects. The classes and methods that define the system are also objects and fully part of the system that they help define. The Smalltalk compiler, which is itself written in Smalltalk and exists alongside all the other code in the system, compiles textual source code into method objects, typically instances of CompiledMethod . These get added to classes by storing them in

2800-421: Is always private to that object. Other objects can query or change that state only by sending requests (messages) to the object to do so. Any message can be sent to any object: when a message is received, the receiver determines whether that message is appropriate. If the message is not understood by the object then the virtual machine sends the doesNotUnderstand: message with the original message as an argument, and

2912-621: Is derived from Smalltalk-80 version 2 by way of Smalltalk-80 2.5 and ObjectWorks (both products of ParcPlace Systems, a Xerox PARC spin-off company formed to bring Smalltalk to the market). As an interesting link between generations, in 2001, Vassili Bykov implemented Hobbes, a virtual machine running Smalltalk-80 inside VisualWorks. ( Dan Ingalls later ported Hobbes to Squeak.) During the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Smalltalk environments, including support, training and add-ons, were sold by two competing organizations: ParcPlace Systems and Digitalk, both California based. ParcPlace Systems tended to focus on

3024-584: Is derived from the software's behavior: as it runs Java bytecode , as with the Self VM, HotSpot continually analyzes the program's performance for hot spots which are executed often or repeatedly. These are then targeted for optimizing , leading to high-performance execution with a minimum of overhead for less performance-critical code. In one report, the JVM beat some C++ or C code in some benchmarks. Initially available as an add-on for Java 1.2, HotSpot became

3136-425: Is developed and maintained. Since the classes are objects, they can be asked questions such as "what methods do you implement?" or "what fields/slots/instance variables do you define?". So objects can easily be inspected, copied, (de) serialized and so on with generic code that applies to any object in the system. Smalltalk-80 also provides computational reflection, the ability to observe the computational state of

3248-607: Is difficult, as much of it is almost extensively written in assembly language , though several sections of it are also written in purely standards conformant ISO C++ . To remedy this, the IcedTea project has developed a generic port of the HotSpot interpreter called zero-assembler Hotspot (or zero ), with almost no assembly code. This port is intended for easy adaptation of the interpreter component of HotSpot to any Linux processor architecture. The code of zero-assembler Hotspot

3360-574: Is implemented on top of the built-in constructs by the standard Smalltalk class library. (For performance reasons, implementations may recognize and treat as special some of those messages; however, this is only an optimization and is not coded into the language syntax.) The adage that "Smalltalk syntax fits on a postcard " may have originated in Alan Kay's original conception of the language, as related by him in practically every of tens or hundreds of public lectures, op. cit., or perhaps it could refer to

3472-535: Is implemented using this facility. One of the more interesting uses of this is in the Seaside web framework which relieves the programmer of dealing with the complexity of a Web Browser's back button by storing continuations for each edited page and switching between them as the user navigates a web site. Programming the web server using Seaside can then be done using a more conventional programming style. As with message sending Smalltalk-80 virtual machines optimize away

HotSpot (virtual machine) - Misplaced Pages Continue

3584-569: Is licensed under the GPLv2, with an exception for system calls that allows code that calls the kernel via system calls not to be licensed under the GPL. Because of the dominance of Linux-based Android on smartphones , Linux, including Android, has the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems as of May 2022 . Linux is, as of March 2024 , used by around 4 percent of desktop computers . The Chromebook , which runs

3696-471: Is now termed Smalltalk-72 and influenced the development of the Actor model . Its syntax and execution model were very different from modern Smalltalk variants. After significant revisions which froze some aspects of execution semantics to gain performance (by adopting a Simula -like class inheritance model of execution), Smalltalk-76 was created. This system had a development environment featuring most of

3808-641: Is summarized in the commonly heard phrase "In Smalltalk everything is an object", which may be more accurately expressed as "all values are objects", as variables are not. Since all values are objects, classes are also objects. Each class is an instance of the metaclass of that class. Metaclasses in turn are also objects, and are all instances of a class named Metaclass. Classes contain method dictionaries that map selectors (the equivalent of function procedure names in other languages) to method objects, objects that are executed to evaluate messages. Classes inherit from other classes, with either Object or ProtoObject at

3920-403: Is that the Linux kernel and other components are free and open-source software. Linux is not the only such operating system, although it is by far the most widely used. Some free and open-source software licenses are based on the principle of copyleft , a kind of reciprocity: any work derived from a copyleft piece of software must also be copyleft itself. The most common free software license,

4032-594: Is the Bourne-Again Shell (bash), originally developed for the GNU Project, other shells such as Zsh are also used. Most low-level Linux components, including various parts of the userland , use the CLI exclusively. The CLI is particularly suited for automation of repetitive or delayed tasks and provides very simple inter-process communication . On desktop systems, the most popular user interfaces are

4144-404: Is the radix or base. The base does not have to be a power of two; for example 36rSMALLTALK is a valid number equal to 80738163270632 decimal. Characters are written by preceding them with a dollar sign: Strings are sequences of characters enclosed in single quotes: To include a quote in a string, escape it using a second quote: Double quotes do not need escaping, since single quotes delimit

4256-419: Is the increasing usage of two web frameworks, Seaside and AIDA/Web , to simplify the building of complex web applications. Seaside has seen considerable market interest with Cincom, Gemstone, and Instantiations incorporating and extending it. Smalltalk was one of many object-oriented programming languages based on Simula . Smalltalk is also one of the most influential programming languages. Virtually all of

4368-486: Is the part of the system that implements the programming system itself, and developers can use the meta-model to do things like walk through, examine, and modify code in the running system, or find all the instances of a certain kind of structure (e.g., all instances of the Method class in the meta-model). Smalltalk-80 is a totally reflective system. Smalltalk-80 provides both structural and computational reflection. Smalltalk

4480-903: Is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries — many of which are provided by the GNU Project — to create a complete operating system. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name " GNU/Linux " to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy . Thousands of distributions exist, many based directly or indirectly on other distributions; popular Linux distributions include Debian , Fedora Linux , Arch Linux , and Ubuntu , while commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise . Other than

4592-475: Is typically built into the firmware and is highly tailored to the system. This includes routers , automation controls, smart home devices , video game consoles , televisions (Samsung and LG smart TVs ), automobiles (Tesla, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Toyota), and spacecraft ( Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon crew capsule, and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter). The Unix operating system

HotSpot (virtual machine) - Misplaced Pages Continue

4704-933: Is used for all the non- x86 architecture ports of HotSpot ( PowerPC , Itanium ( IA-64 ), S390 and ARM ) since version 1.6. Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning , but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay , Dan Ingalls , Adele Goldberg , Ted Kaehler , Diana Merry , and Scott Wallace. In Smalltalk, executing programs are built of opaque, atomic, so-called objects, which are instances of template code stored in classes. These objects intercommunicate by passing of messages, via an intermediary virtual machine environment (VM). A relatively small number of objects, called primitives, are not amenable to live redefinition, sometimes being defined independently of

4816-415: Is used on a wide variety of devices including PCs, workstations , mainframes and embedded systems . Linux is the predominant operating system for servers and is also used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers . When combined with Android , which is Linux-based and designed for smartphones , they have the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems . The Linux kernel

4928-577: The Dynabook which resembles modern tablet computers like the iPad. Smalltalk environments were often the first to develop what are now common object-oriented software design patterns. One of the most popular is the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern for user interface design. The MVC pattern enables developers to have multiple consistent views of the same underlying data. It's ideal for software development environments, where there are various views (e.g., entity-relation, dataflow, object model, etc.) of

5040-421: The Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) in 1989. By the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system (such as libraries, compilers , text editors , a command-line shell , and a windowing system ) were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers , daemons , and the kernel , called GNU Hurd , were stalled and incomplete. Minix

5152-713: The GNU toolchain , which includes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the GNU Build System . Amongst others, GCC provides compilers for Ada , C , C++ , Go and Fortran . Many programming languages have a cross-platform reference implementation that supports Linux, for example PHP , Perl , Ruby , Python , Java , Go , Rust and Haskell . First released in 2003, the LLVM project provides an alternative cross-platform open-source compiler for many languages. Proprietary compilers for Linux include

5264-473: The GUI shells , packaged together with extensive Desktop environments , such as KDE Plasma , GNOME , MATE , Cinnamon , LXDE , Pantheon , and Xfce , though a variety of additional user interfaces exist. Most popular user interfaces are based on the X Window System, often simply called "X". It provides network transparency and permits a graphical application running on one system to be displayed on another where

5376-603: The Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2017, but it was not among the 26 most loved programming languages of the 2018 survey. There are a large number of Smalltalk variants. The unqualified word Smalltalk is often used to indicate the Smalltalk-80 language and compatible VM, the first version to be made publicly available and created in 1980. The first hardware-environments which ran the Smalltalk VMs were Xerox Alto computers. Smalltalk

5488-476: The shell , is either a command-line interface (CLI), a graphical user interface (GUI), or controls attached to the associated hardware, which is common for embedded systems. For desktop systems, the default user interface is usually graphical, although the CLI is commonly available through terminal emulator windows or on a separate virtual console . CLI shells are text-based user interfaces, which use text for both input and output. The dominant shell used in Linux

5600-399: The 1970s and 1980s. Such a system uses a monolithic kernel , the Linux kernel, which handles process control, networking, access to the peripherals , and file systems . Device drivers are either integrated directly with the kernel or added as modules that are loaded while the system is running. The GNU userland is a key part of most systems based on the Linux kernel, with Android being

5712-454: The 1980s, it became more difficult for hardware manufacturers to profit from this tactic, as the OS would run on any manufacturer's computer that shared the same architecture. Most programming languages support Linux either directly or through third-party community based ports . The original development tools used for building both Linux applications and operating system programs are found within

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5824-526: The Digitalk products initially tried to reach a wider audience with a lower price. IBM initially supported the Digitalk product, but then entered the market with a Smalltalk product in 1995 named VisualAge/Smalltalk. Easel introduced Enfin at this time on Windows and OS/2. Enfin became far more popular in Europe, as IBM introduced it into IT shops before their development of IBM Smalltalk (later VisualAge). Enfin

5936-674: The GNU General Public License (GPL), is a form of copyleft and is used for the Linux kernel and many of the components from the GNU Project. Linux-based distributions are intended by developers for interoperability with other operating systems and established computing standards. Linux systems adhere to POSIX, SUS , LSB , ISO , and ANSI standards where possible, although to date only one Linux distribution has been POSIX.1 certified, Linux-FT. Free software projects, although developed through collaboration , are often produced independently of each other. The fact that

6048-464: The Linux kernel, key components that make up a distribution may include a display server (windowing system) , a package manager , a bootloader and the Bash shell . Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open-source software collaboration. While originally developed for x86 based personal computers , it has since been ported to more platforms than any other operating system, and

6160-650: The Linux kernel-based ChromeOS , dominates the US K–12 education market and represents nearly 20 percent of sub-$ 300 notebook sales in the US. Linux is the leading operating system on servers (over 96.4% of the top one million web servers' operating systems are Linux), leads other big iron systems such as mainframe computers , and is used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers (as of November 2017 , having gradually displaced all competitors). Linux also runs on embedded systems , i.e., devices whose operating system

6272-613: The Linux kernel. On July 3, 1991, to implement Unix system calls , Linus Torvalds attempted unsuccessfully to obtain a digital copy of the POSIX standards documentation with a request to the comp.os.minix newsgroup . After not finding the POSIX documentation, Torvalds initially resorted to determining system calls from SunOS documentation owned by the university for use in operating its Sun Microsystems server. He also learned some system calls from Tanenbaum's Minix text. Torvalds began

6384-513: The Self project, two key people, Urs Hölzle and Lars Bak left Sun to start Longview. In 1997, Sun Microsystems purchased Animorphic. Shortly after acquiring Animorphic, Sun decided to write a new stronger just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the Java virtual machine, named HotSpot server compiler (internal name C2), which was initially developed by Clifford Click and was an extension of his PhD thesis on optimizing compilers. The compiler name HotSpot

6496-491: The Smalltalk programming environment. Having undergone significant industry development toward other uses, including business and database functions, Smalltalk is still in use today. When first publicly released, Smalltalk-80 presented numerous foundational ideas for the nascent field of object-oriented programming (OOP). Since inception, the language provided interactive programming via an integrated development environment . This requires reflection and late binding in

6608-510: The Unix/Sun microsystems market, while Digitalk focused on Intel-based PCs running Microsoft Windows or IBM's OS/2. Both firms struggled to take Smalltalk mainstream due to Smalltalk's substantial memory needs, limited run-time performance, and initial lack of supported connectivity to SQL -based relational database servers. While the high price of ParcPlace Smalltalk limited its market penetration to mid-sized and large commercial organizations,

6720-415: The beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers." Bryan Cantrill , an engineer of

6832-701: The business. In 1999, Seagull Software acquired the ObjectShare Java development lab (including the original Smalltalk/V and Visual Smalltalk development team), and still owns VisualSmalltalk, although worldwide distribution rights for the Smalltalk product remained with ObjectShare who then sold them to Cincom . VisualWorks was sold to Cincom and is now part of Cincom Smalltalk. Cincom has backed Smalltalk strongly, releasing multiple new versions of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio each year since 1999. Cincom , GemTalk, and Instantiations, continue to sell Smalltalk environments. IBM ended VisualAge Smalltalk, having in

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6944-770: The central concept in Smalltalk-80 (but not in Smalltalk-72) is that of an object . An object is always an instance of a class . Classes are "blueprints" that describe the properties and behavior of their instances. For example, a GUI's window class might declare that windows have properties such as the label, the position and whether the window is visible or not. The class might also declare that instances support operations such as opening, closing, moving and hiding. Each particular window object would have its own values of those properties, and each of them would be able to perform operations defined by its class. A Smalltalk object can do exactly three things: The state an object holds

7056-447: The complexity and diversity of different devices, and due to the large number of formats and standards handled by those APIs, this infrastructure needs to evolve to better fit other devices. Also, a good userspace device library is the key to the success of having userspace applications to be able to work with all formats supported by those devices. The primary difference between Linux and many other popular contemporary operating systems

7168-498: The consumer market is perhaps the mobile device market, with Android being the dominant operating system on smartphones and very popular on tablets and, more recently, on wearables . Linux gaming is also on the rise with Valve showing its support for Linux and rolling out SteamOS , its own gaming-oriented Linux distribution, which was later implemented in their Steam Deck platform. Linux distributions have also gained popularity with various local and national governments, such as

7280-418: The default Sun JVM in Java 1.3. JRE (originally from Sun, now from Oracle) features two virtual machines, one called Client and the other Server . The Client version is tuned for quick loading. It makes use of interpretation. The Server version loads more slowly, putting more effort into producing highly optimized JIT compilations to yield higher performance. Both VMs compile only often-run methods, using

7392-471: The default implementation of doesNotUnderstand: raises an exception that if not caught opens the system's debugger. Alan Kay has commented that despite the attention given to objects, messaging is the most important concept in Smalltalk: "The big idea is 'messaging'—that is what the kernel of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase)." Unlike most other languages, Smalltalk code can be modified while

7504-467: The design of Unix served as a scaffolding, "Linux grew with a lot of mutations – and because the mutations were less than random, they were faster and more directed than alpha-particles in DNA ." Eric S. Raymond considers Linux's revolutionary aspects to be social, not technical: before Linux, complex software was designed carefully by small groups, but "Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly

7616-508: The development of 386BSD , from which NetBSD , OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. Linus Torvalds has stated on separate occasions that if the GNU kernel or 386BSD had been available at the time (1991), he probably would not have created Linux. While attending the University of Helsinki in the fall of 1990, Torvalds enrolled in a Unix course. The course used a MicroVAX minicomputer running Ultrix , and one of

7728-532: The development of the Linux kernel on Minix and applications written for Minix were also used on Linux. Later, Linux matured and further Linux kernel development took place on Linux systems. GNU applications also replaced all Minix components, because it was advantageous to use the freely available code from the GNU Project with the fledgling operating system; code licensed under the GNU GPL can be reused in other computer programs as long as they also are released under

7840-476: The development of the components of the system and free software. An analysis of the Linux kernel in 2017 showed that well over 85% of the code was developed by programmers who are being paid for their work, leaving about 8.2% to unpaid developers and 4.1% unclassified. Some of the major corporations that provide contributions include Intel , Samsung , Google , AMD , Oracle , and Facebook . Several corporations, notably Red Hat, Canonical , and SUSE have built

7952-475: The entire Java Development Kit (JDK), HotSpot is supported by Oracle Corporation on Windows , Linux , and macOS . Supported instruction set architectures (ISAs) are x86-64 and AArch64 . Since JDK 15, Solaris and SPARC are no longer supported. Ports are also available by third parties for various other Unix operating systems . Several different hardware architectures are supported, including x86, PowerPC , and SPARC (Solaris only). Porting HotSpot

8064-423: The expensive use of contexts internally, providing the illusion and flexibility of a spaghetti stack without most its costs. Essentially context objects are created lazily as required, for example when a message is sent to the thisContext variable. An example of how Smalltalk can use reflection is the mechanism for handling errors. When an object is sent a message that it does not implement, the virtual machine sends

8176-559: The federal government of Brazil . Linus Torvalds is the lead maintainer for the Linux kernel and guides its development, while Greg Kroah-Hartman is the lead maintainer for the stable branch. Zoë Kooyman is the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, which in turn supports the GNU components. Finally, individuals and corporations develop third-party non-GNU components. These third-party components comprise

8288-436: The first being the sender of the former. In this way the stack is a linked list of context objects, and the debugger is essentially an inspector of this "spaghetti stack". By sending messages to thisContext a method activation can ask questions like "who sent this message to me". These facilities make it possible to implement coroutines or Prolog -like back-tracking without modifying the virtual machine. The exception system

8400-471: The first version of the Linux kernel on the Internet . Like GNU and 386BSD, Linux did not have any Unix code and therefore avoided any current legal issues . Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland and a desktop environment such as GNOME , KDE Plasma or Xfce . Distributions intended for servers may not have a graphical user interface at all or include

8512-496: The language execution of code . Later development has led to at least one instance of Smalltalk execution environment which lacks such an integrated graphical user interface or front-end. Smalltalk-like languages are in active development and have gathered communities of users around them. American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk. Smalltalk took second place for "most loved programming language" in

8624-646: The last two being vectors of bytes. Consequently Smalltalk can evaluate 52 factorial to produce 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000. The transition from small to large integers is transparent to the programmer; variables do not require type declarations. This makes the system both concise and flexible. A programmer can change or extend (through subclassing ) the classes that implement what in other languages would be primitive values, so that new behavior can be defined for their instances—for example, to implement new control structures—or even so that their existing behavior will be changed. This fact

8736-534: The late 1990s decided to back Java instead and, as of 2005 , is supported by Instantiations, Inc. Instantiations renamed the product VA Smalltalk (VAST Platform) and continue to release new versions yearly. The open Squeak implementation has an active community of developers, including many of the original Smalltalk community, and was used to provide the Etoys environment on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project,

8848-516: The mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM , followed by Hewlett-Packard , started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft 's monopoly in the desktop operating system market. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing, from embedded systems to virtually all supercomputers , and have secured

8960-441: The notable exception. The GNU C library , an implementation of the C standard library , works as a wrapper for the system calls of the Linux kernel necessary to the kernel-userspace interface, the toolchain is a broad collection of programming tools vital to Linux development (including the compilers used to build the Linux kernel itself), and the coreutils implement many basic Unix tools . The GNU Project also develops Bash ,

9072-452: The now familiar tools, including a class library code browser/editor. Smalltalk-80 added metaclasses , to help maintain the "everything is an object" (except variables) paradigm by associating properties and behavior with individual classes, and even primitives such as integer and Boolean values (for example, to support different ways to create instances). Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC. In 1981, it

9184-411: The object the doesNotUnderstand: message with a reification of the message as an argument. The message (another object, an instance of Message ) contains the selector of the message and an Array of its arguments. In an interactive Smalltalk system the default implementation of doesNotUnderstand: is one that opens an error window (a Notifier) reporting the error to the user. Through this and

9296-476: The object-oriented languages that came after— Flavors , CLOS , Objective-C , Java , Python , Ruby , and many others—were influenced by Smalltalk. Smalltalk was also one of the most popular languages for agile software development methods, rapid application development (RAD) or prototyping, and software design patterns . The highly productive environment provided by Smalltalk platforms made them ideal for rapid, iterative development. Smalltalk emerged from

9408-501: The operating system to their specific needs. Distributions are maintained by individuals, loose-knit teams, volunteer organizations, and commercial entities. A distribution is responsible for the default configuration of the installed Linux kernel, general system security, and more generally integration of the different software packages into a coherent whole. Distributions typically use a package manager such as apt , yum , zypper , pacman or portage to install, remove, and update all of

9520-471: The reflective facilities the user can examine the context in which the error occurred, redefine the offending code, and continue, all within the system, using Smalltalk-80's reflective facilities. By creating a class that understands (implements) only doesNotUnderstand:, one can create an instance that can intercept any message sent to it via its doesNotUnderstand: method. Such instances are called transparent proxies. Such proxies can then be used to implement

9632-455: The required texts was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum . This textbook included a copy of Tanenbaum's Minix operating system. It was with this course that Torvalds first became exposed to Unix. In 1991, he became curious about operating systems. Frustrated by the licensing of Minix, which at the time limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his operating system kernel, which eventually became

9744-410: The root of the class hierarchy. Sending a message to an object at the most abstract involves fetching the class of the receiver (the object being sent the message) and looking up the message's selector in the class's method dictionary, followed by the superclass and so on until the method is found or doesNotUnderstand is sent. Smalltalk virtual machines use various techniques to speed up message lookup so

9856-462: The rules for variable identifiers but denote bindings that a programmer cannot change. The true , false , and nil pseudo-variables are singleton instances. self and super refer to the receiver of a message within a method activated in response to that message, but sends to super are looked up in the superclass of the method's defining class rather than the class of the receiver, which allows methods in subclasses to invoke methods of

9968-473: The same name in superclasses. thisContext refers to the current activation record. The only built-in language constructs are message sends, assignment, method return and literal syntax for some objects. From its origins as a language for children of all ages, standard Smalltalk syntax uses punctuation in a manner more like English than mainstream coding languages. The remainder of the language, including control structures for conditional evaluation and iteration,

10080-412: The same or a compatible license. Torvalds initiated a switch from his original license, which prohibited commercial redistribution, to the GNU GPL. Developers worked to integrate GNU components with the Linux kernel, creating a fully functional and free operating system. Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention " Freax ", a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During

10192-568: The same underlying specification. Also, for simulations or games where the underlying model may be viewed from various angles and levels of abstraction. In addition to the MVC pattern, the Smalltalk language and environment were influential in the history of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the what you see is what you get ( WYSIWYG ) user interface, font editors, and desktop metaphors for UI design. The powerful built-in debugging and object inspection tools that came with Smalltalk environments set

10304-406: The sense that they are instances of corresponding classes, and operations on them are invoked by sending messages. For efficiency and generality integers are implemented by four classes, Integer, the abstract superclass of all integers, SmallInteger, whose instances fit in a machine word, for example having a 61-bit signed range in a 64-bit implementation, LargePositiveInteger and LargeNegativeInteger,

10416-441: The software licenses explicitly permit redistribution, however, provides a basis for larger-scale projects that collect the software produced by stand-alone projects and make it available all at once in the form of a Linux distribution. Many Linux distributions manage a remote collection of system software and application software packages available for download and installation through a network connection. This allows users to adapt

10528-449: The standard for all the integrated development environments , starting with Lisp Machine environments, that came after. Smalltalk uses several commands that rhyme with the "-ect" suffix. This was inspired by a line from the 1967 Arlo Guthrie monologue " Alice's Restaurant Massacree ," in which Guthrie underwent a battery of being "injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected." As in other object-oriented languages,

10640-586: The start of his work on the system, some of the project's makefiles included the name "Freax" for about half a year. Initially, Torvalds considered the name "Linux" but dismissed it as too egotistical. To facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server ( ftp.funet.fi ) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, Torvalds' coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who

10752-502: The system is running. Live coding and applying fixes 'on-the-fly' is a dominant programming methodology for Smalltalk and is one of the main reasons for its productivity. Smalltalk is a "pure" object-oriented programming language, meaning that, unlike C++ and Java , there are no primitive types. All values are represented as objects and computation on integers uses message sending just like any other object. In Smalltalk, types such as integers, Booleans and characters are also objects, in

10864-465: The system provides both a simple consistent message binding mechanism and good efficiency. Code blocks —Smalltalk's way of expressing anonymous functions —are also objects. They have a very lightweight syntax and are used throughout the system to implement control structures, especially for the Collection hierarchy. Reflection is a feature of having a meta-model as Smalltalk does. The meta-model

10976-410: The system. In languages derived from the original Smalltalk-80 the current activation of a method is accessible as an object named via a pseudo-variable (one of the six reserved words), thisContext , which corresponds to a stack frame in conventional language implementations, and is called a "context". Sending a message is done within some context, and to evaluate the message another context is created,

11088-471: The use case of the system. This custom interface is accessed through a client that resides on another system, not necessarily Linux-based. Several types of window managers exist for X11, including tiling , dynamic , stacking , and compositing . Window managers provide means to control the placement and appearance of individual application windows, and interact with the X Window System. Simpler X window managers such as dwm , ratpoison , or i3wm provide

11200-559: The various distribution-specific support and community forums, such as ones for Ubuntu , Fedora, Arch Linux , Gentoo , etc. Linux distributions host mailing lists ; commonly there will be a specific topic such as usage or development for a given list. There are several technology websites with a Linux focus. Print magazines on Linux often bundle cover disks that carry software or even complete Linux distributions. Although Linux distributions are generally available without charge, several large corporations sell, support, and contribute to

11312-562: The virtual machine execution. Some are standard and must be found in any conforming Java virtual machine ; others are specific to HotSpot and may not be found in other JVMs (options that begin with -X or -XX are non-standard). On 13 November 2006, the HotSpot JVM and the Java Development Kit (JDK) were licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. This is the code that became part of Java 7 . As with

11424-429: The word "Linux" should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code. However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ ( LEEN -uuks ) with a short but close front unrounded vowel , instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post. The adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in

11536-508: Was conceived and implemented in 1969, at AT&T 's Bell Labs , in the United States by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna . First released in 1971, Unix was written entirely in assembly language , as was common practice at the time. In 1973, in a key pioneering approach, it was rewritten in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie (except for some hardware and I/O routines). The availability of

11648-498: Was created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum , a computer science professor, and released in 1987 as a minimal Unix-like operating system targeted at students and others who wanted to learn operating system principles. Although the complete source code of Minix was freely available, the licensing terms prevented it from being free software until the licensing changed in April 2000. Although not released until 1992, due to legal complications ,

11760-510: Was designed by Linus Torvalds , following the lack of a working kernel for GNU , a Unix -compatible operating system made entirely of free software that had been undergoing development since 1983 by Richard Stallman . While a separate working Unix-compatible system called Minix was later released, its license was not entirely free at the time. The first entirely free Unix for personal computers, 386BSD , did not appear until 1992, by which time Torvalds had already built and publicly released

11872-519: Was in November 1981. Xerox only distributed Version 1 to Apple, DEC, HP, and Tektronix, but these companies were allowed unrestricted redistribution via any system they built. This encouraged the wide spread of Smalltalk. Later, in 1983, Xerox released Smalltalk-80 Version 2. This version was generally available to the public, although under a restrictive license. Versions 1 and 2 were fairly similar, although Version 2 did have some added features such as

11984-625: Was later acquired by Cincom Systems , and is now sold under the name ObjectStudio , and is part of the Cincom Smalltalk product suite. In 1995, ParcPlace and Digitalk merged into ParcPlace-Digitalk and then rebranded in 1997 as ObjectShare, located in Irvine, CA. ObjectShare ( NASDAQ : OBJS) was traded publicly until 1999, when it was delisted and dissolved. The merged firm never managed to find an effective response to Java as to market positioning, and by 1997 its owners were looking to sell

12096-459: Was later originally developed, it represented the first successful commercial attempt at distributing a primarily single-user microcomputer that ran a Unix operating system. With Unix increasingly "locked in" as a proprietary product, the GNU Project , started in 1983 by Richard Stallman , had the goal of creating a "complete Unix-compatible software system" composed entirely of free software . Work began in 1984. Later, in 1985, Stallman started

12208-513: Was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name, so he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds. Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds, the word "Linux" should be pronounced ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / LIN -uuks ) with a short 'i' as in 'print' and 'u' as in 'put'. To further demonstrate how

12320-518: Was released from its obligation not to enter the computer business; freed of that obligation, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product, where users were not legally allowed to modify it. Onyx Systems began selling early microcomputer-based Unix workstations in 1980. Later, Sun Microsystems , founded as a spin-off of a student project at Stanford University , also began selling Unix-based desktop workstations in 1982. While Sun workstations did not use commodity PC hardware, for which Linux

12432-406: Was shared with Tektronix , Hewlett-Packard , Apple Computer , and DEC for review and debugging on their platforms. The August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine was devoted to Smalltalk-80 and brought its ideas to a large audience. Several books on Smalltalk-80 were also published. Smalltalk-80 became the basis for all future commercial versions of Smalltalk. The final release of Smalltalk-80 Version 1

12544-510: Was the product of research led by Alan Kay at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Alan Kay designed most of the early Smalltalk versions, Adele Goldberg wrote most of the documentation, and Dan Ingalls implemented most of the early versions. The first version, termed Smalltalk-71, was created by Kay in a few mornings on a bet that a programming language based on the idea of message passing inspired by Simula could be implemented in "a page of code". A later variant used for research work

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