trip report: parc place

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

I went to Parc Place to pick up the new smalltalks.  In the process I
saw a demo of the beta Cynergy and I talked to Adele about various
things. 

Cynergy will be wonderful when it works.  One major caveat: I don't
know whether it will work with the CLASS macros and such.  It vaguely
recall such a thing....  First the bad news.  They have one bug
reported that may be a show-stopper.  OTherwise full release will be
end of September.  This date feels solid (except for that bug).  The
release will only be for Sun 3s running 4.0.  Other machines will
follow.  I saw it running on a Sun 4, but the debugger didn't work at
all.  

Now some good news.  
.full dependency tracking for minimal recompilation
.incremental linking
.2.0 c++
.watchpoints on global and stack variables
.hierarchical structure inspector: click a variable, it expands to a
subtree that shows all the fields in the structure.  Click any of
those and they expand, ...  All this gets updated during execution.
.click on a stackframe and see the code.
.can provide explanations for the current selection
.walk through the code following class hierarchies, inclusion
hierarchies, senders of a given member function, implementers,
callers, users of a class, etc.
.place breakpoints anywhere in the code.
.stepping debugger.
.separate window for the tty

The main missing feature is an expression evaluator.  Also, there is
no joint Cynergy/Smalltalk environment.
-----
My conversation with Adele.  MARKETING people take note.

Adele is quite interested in libraries for C++.  They want to find
libraries of which they approve and make sure they get marketed with
Cynergy.  This could be on a royalty basis, exclusive, non-exclusive,
whatever.  Likewise with our frontend libraries.  If we would prefer
to be the ones interacting with the customer and licensing this stuff,
then we could remarket Cynergy and add our libraries rather than the
other way around.  Likewise with whatever we want to do in the
Smalltalk environment.  Is this interesting?

She was also interested in the Smalltalk to C++ translator.  (Marcs:
now you can add that to your glossary).  She certainly sees the
potential of prototyping in Smalltalk and then transferiing to
Cynergy....  She suggested we all get in a room sometime after
October (Oopsla and our deadlines).

dean