eighty-twenty

Part of a series: #squeak-phone

Here’s a quick demo video of the status of my quixotic project to get Squeak running as a kind of standalone userland on a modern cellphone:

(The sound is bad! I recorded it on my other cellphone…)

Currently, I develop by coding in Squeak on my Linux desktop, using my graphics tablet as a kind of proxy for a touchscreen. I use the FFI and AIO/OSProcess support in Squeak to read events from /dev/input/event.... For event sources that present absolute axes, I create instances of HandMorph in the World and animate them according to the incoming events.

Every now and then, to test on the real hardware, I use rsync to copy the changes and image files up to the cellphone, and then log in to the phone over ssh to restart the Cog VM.

At the moment, the image has enough smarts to figure out how to read the touchscreen and offer basic touchscreen click support. This lets me do simple things like open, move and close windows, and lets me save and/or quit the image.

Next steps are to make it harder to misclick – perhaps by increasing the size of some of the touch targets – and to think about coding up a simple onscreen keyboard.

Alternatively, on a parallel path, I’ve been reverse-engineering (really nothing more sophisticated than strace of cbd and rild) the Samsung protocols for booting and operating the cellular modem. The code is short and simple. Perhaps instead of an onscreen keyboard I’ll code up a quick dialer Morph and get Squeak making phone calls.

Part of a series: #squeak-phone

I’ve made some minor image changes to adjust cached glyphs in TrueType fonts in Squeak when the DPI changes. Here are the results:

On the left, a stock, fresh-from-squeak.org unconfigured image, that wrongly believes the screen to be 96 DPI.

On the right, my dev image as I left it on my desktop PC, simply scped up to the phone and run, set to the correct 535 DPI resolution for the phone. Much better!

Part of a series: #squeak-phone

Back in 2007, when Openmoko was first a thing, I wrote an Erlang-based userland that got to the point of being able to take and make calls and receive and send SMS. The project stalled: the Openmoko GTA01 was too slow, its power-management too primitive, and Erlang’s GUI facilities too rudimentary to make further work worthwhile.

Modern cellphone hardware is much more capable. Is it time to have another run at the idea of a mobile personal computer?

PostmarketOS is awesome

Last week, I installed PostmarketOS on my previous cellphone, a Samsung Galaxy S7 (using PostmarketOS’s samsung-herolte configuration).

PostmarketOS turns out to be a beautifully engineered system that’s easy to understand and modify. The basics of kernel and Alpine Linux userland installed cleanly and easily on the phone, and it’s running well as a development platform. I’m looking forward to getting into PostmarketOS more deeply.

Running htop on the phone shows what an amazing little machine it is! So much power. Loads of cores, lots of RAM. Plenty of space to explore alternative visions of mobile personal computing.

However, the built-in demos, such as the Weston demo (shown above at right), currently leave quite a bit to be desired. Perhaps some of the other user interface options included with PostmarketOS could get me closer to a day-to-day usable cellphone - but I’m interested in running my own software! Let’s get hacking.

Running my own programs

PostmarketOS is a plain, clean Alpine Linux distribution. You can SSH into it initially via USB networking. From there, you can configure wifi using nmcli, set up SSH keys, and then access it directly using SSH over wifi.

Building software is just as simple:

apk add alpine-sdk

To experiment with drawing to the framebuffer and reading touchscreen input via /dev/input, I compiled and ran an old quick and dirty framebuffer hack I wrote years ago. The results (shown at left) were encouraging: the program effortlessly animates tens of thousands of points at 30 frames per second, responding to touch inputs. Display is via brute-force pixel output to the mmap‘d frame buffer. It doesn’t even use a full core.

PostmarketOS turns a phone into a fully capable Linux machine, with total control over the attached hardware, and with everything accessible to the developer in the usual places using the usual tools.

But Unix tools are inappropriate for a mobile personal computing platform. We’ll need something else.

A Smalltalk phone

Smalltalk could make an ideal basis for a mobile personal computing platform.

I’ve enjoyed using, developing with, and contributing to the Squeak Smalltalk implementation since the mid ’00s.

So I compiled the Cog Smalltalk VM on the phone itself, making use of the 64-bit ARM support code that landed extremely recently.

And lo and behold, it runs! Shown to the right is a bleeding-edge, fully up-to-date Squeak 6.0-alpha image running on the phone itself. (Click here or on the image to embiggen.)

From here, I can experiment with new ideas using the full power of a modern Smalltalk environment.

What next?

My previous Openmoko experiments foundered, in part, on the GUI aspect of the system; GTK+ via Erlang was fine for quick prototyping but wasn’t really up to the task for a day-to-day usable machine.

I recall getting Squeak running on my GTA01, in order to see if it could provide a viable UI. However, I remember being stymied by the mismatch between the expectations of the Smalltalk environment and the realities of the phone.

Squeak wants a mouse and keyboard. It assumes a monitor-sized display, in everything from widget and font sizes to window management. To work well on a phone, it needs a touchscreen-based, high-DPI UI in addition to its existing toolset.

Smalltalk, in both its language aspect and its system design aspect, also suffers from some weaknesses in areas where Erlang shines.

However, in the years since the GTA01:

• the hardware is much better,

• the Squeak VM and image are better,

• I’ve learned a heck of a lot about some good ways to design interactive systems, and

• I’ve recently built some tools that help bring Erlang- and Syndicate-style architectural patterns for concurrency to Smalltalk.

So I think using Erlang/Syndicate-style Actors to structure a Smalltalk-based phone userland, perhaps with cgroups-based sub-virtual-machines and images, could work well.

My initial experiments have concentrated on

• fixing the tiny fonts (the DPI-change support code in the image needs work, and the support in the VM seems to be absent (?)),

• reading from the touchscreen (probably like this),

• thinking about how to structure Actor supervision hierarchies and Dataspaces for a mobile phone (probably borrowing some design elements from my earlier Openmoko Erlang-based userland), and

• thinking about how to layer a touchscreen (panel-based?) GUI atop Squeak’s Morphic UI.

I’ll write more on this blog under the tag #squeak-phone as things develop.

I am doing some fascinating and rewarding contract work that makes direct use of some of the skills I developed and knowledge I acquired during my PhD studies. It’s bloody wonderful and I’m very lucky.

I’m even luckier that it’s not currently a full-time gig. This means I have, in principle, plenty of time to pursue my own ideas. Pandemic and family life permitting, of course.

While there’s a lot of joy in building things just for myself, it’s also a lot of fun to share the things I make with others. So I’ve decided I’ll aim to write more here about what I’m doing.

I’ve just figured out (with the assistance of pages like japaric’s rust-cross guide) how to cross-build a small Rust project for FRμITOS, which is an Alpine Linux based distribution (using musl libc) for Raspberry Pi, using a Debian x86_64 host.

It was ultimately very nicely straightforward.

1. Install the Debian binutils-arm-linux-gnueabihf package.
2. Use rustup to install support for the armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf target.
3. Set the CARGO_TARGET_ARMV7_UNKNOWN_LINUX_MUSLEABIHF_LINKER environment variable appropriately.
4. Run cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf.

That’s it!

In shell script form:

sudo apt install binutils-arm-linux-gnueabihf
rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
CARGO_TARGET_ARMV7_UNKNOWN_LINUX_MUSLEABIHF_LINKER=arm-linux-gnueabihf-ld \
  cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf

Recent discussions (e.g. 1, 2) about potentially revising Racket syntax for Racket2 have reminded me I never properly announced #lang something, an experiment from back in 2016.

The main idea is S-expressions, but with usually-implicit parentheses and support for prefix/infix/postfix operators. Indentation for grouping is explicitly represented in the S-expression returned from the reader.

• (+) keeps a semi-structured input format: reader yields ordinary syntax
• (+) macros Just Work
• (+) you can do “if … then … else …”: an example
• (+) you can do “… where …”: an example
• (-) uses indentation (though it doesn’t have to; see for example this module)
• (-) the function syntax isn’t function(arg, ...)

(More links at the bottom of this post.)

In addition to the reader, #lang something provides a small selection of special forms that take advantage of the new syntax, and #lang something/shell adds Unix-shell-like behaviour and a few associated utilities.

This program:

#lang something
for { x: 1 .. 10 }
  def y: x + 1
  printf "x ~a y ~a\n" x y

… reads as this S-expression:

(module something-module something/base
  (#%rewrite-body
   (for (block (x (block (1 .. 10))))
        (block (def y (block (x + 1)))
               (printf "x ~a y ~a\n" x y)))))

The #%rewrite-body macro, together with its companion #%rewrite-infix, consults an operator table, extendable via the def-operator macro, to rewrite infix syntax into standard prefix S-expressions using a Pratt parser.

The block syntax has many different interpretations. It has a macro binding that turns it into a Racket match-lambda*, and it is used as literal syntax as input to other macro definitions.

For example, here’s one possible implementation of that for syntax:

#lang something

provide
  for

require
  for-syntax something/base
  prefix-in base_ racket/base

def-syntax for stx
  syntax-case stx (block)
    _ (block (v (block exp)) ...) (block body ...)
      (syntax (base_for ((v exp) ...) body ...))

def-operator .. 10 nonassoc in-range

Notice how the block S-expressions are rewritten into a normal S-expression compatible with the underlying for from racket/base.

Generally, all of these forms are equivalent

x y z          x y z:          x y z { a; b }
  a              a
  b              b

and they are read as

(x y z (block a b))

and are then made available to the normal macro-expansion process (which involves a new infix-rewriting semi-phase).

Colons are optional to indicate a following suite at the end of an indentation-sensitive line. Indentation-sensitivity is disabled inside parentheses. If inside a parenthesised expression, indentation-sensitivity can be reenabled with a colon at the end of a line:

a b (c d:
      e
      f)

= (a b (c d (block e f)))

a b (c d
      e
      f)

= (a b (c d e f))

Conversely, long lines may be split up and logically continued over subsequent physical lines with a trailing \:

a b c \
  d \
  e

= (a b c d e)

Semicolons may also appear in vertically-laid-out suites; these two are equivalent:

x y z
  a
  b; c
  d

x y z { a; b; c; d }

Suites may begin on the same line as their colon. Any indented subsequent lines become children of the portion after the colon, rather than the portion before.

This example:

x y z: a b
  c d
  e

reads as

(x y z (block (a b (block (c d) e))))

Square brackets are syntactic sugar for a #%seq macro:

[a; b; c; d e f]    →        (#%seq a b c (d e f))

[                   →        (#%seq a (b (block c)) (d e f))
  a
  b
    c
  d e f
]

Forms starting with block in expression context expand into match-lambda* like this:

{
  pat1a pat1b
    exp1a
    exp1b
  pat2a
    exp2
}

→ (match-lambda*
    [(list pat1a pat1b) exp1a exp1b]
    [(list pat2a) exp2])

The map* function exported from something/base differs from map in racket/base in that it takes its arguments in the opposite order, permitting maps to be written

map* [1; 2; 3; 4]
  item:
    item + 1

map* [1; 2; 3; 4]
  item: item + 1

map* [1; 2; 3; 4]: item: item + 1

map* [1; 2; 3; 4] { item: item + 1 }

A nice consequence of all of the above is that curried functions have an interesting appearance:

def curried x:: y:: z:
  [x; y; z]

require rackunit
check-equal? (((curried 1) 2) 3) [1; 2; 3]

A few more links:

• The repository

• #lang something/shell in action: https://asciinema.org/a/83450
• Implementation of #lang something/shell
• An example “shell script”

Another small example “shell script”, which I used while working on the module today:

#lang something/shell

def in-hashlang? re :: source-filename
  zero? (cat source-filename | grep -Eq (format "^#lang.*(~a).*" re))

(find "." -iname "*.rkt"
  | port->lines
  |> filter (in-hashlang? "something")
  |> ag -F "parameterize")

A few years back, I decided to try to put a little bit of structure on how I kept records of such things as

• ideas and thoughts I have, related to my work
• procedures I performed in setting up machines and software
• phone calls I’d had for arranging real-life things
• important identifiers and numbers and so on
• meeting notes
• to-do lists

I’ve ended up with a loose collection of journal-like documents, each with a different feel.

• A master org-mode document, which is always open in a buffer in my Emacs session.

  It contains

  • a plain-text time-stamped journal of thoughts, ideas, workings-through of proofs and formalisms, book and paper reviews, talk notes, meeting notes, phone call notes, etc.
  • detailed step-by-step records of how I’ve installed and configured various pieces of software for specific tasks; “how-tos”, essentially, for when I have to do the same kind of thing again
  • detailed step-by-step records of how I’ve set up various servers
  • to-do lists

  I use org-mode sections, with one top-level heading called Journal containing the bulk of the entries.

  To-do items each get a top-level heading of their own and an org-mode TODO tag. Completed to-do items are demoted to second-level and moved into a “done items” top-level heading.

  When I’m doing paid work, I use org-mode’s timesheet-management commands org-clock-in and org-clock-out under a Timesheet top-level heading; a couple of simple scripts help me prepare summaries for invoicing.

  Here’s a sample of just a few headings - each entry in the real document also has a bunch of text contained within it.

  * Journal
    :PROPERTIES:
    :VISIBILITY: children
    :END:
  ** (2011-05-08 14:31:13 tonyg) Vertical interpretation vs Horizontal interpretation :STUDY:
  ** (2011-05-19 00:00:00 tonyg) Inter-network routing: should be *tunnelling* not *chaining*
  ** (2011-05-19 11:49:40 tonyg) Memory Pool System - API for virtual machine interface? :STUDY:
  ** (2011-05-19 18:30:50 tonyg) Scripting languages integrate with system languages. :STUDY:
  ** (2011-05-23 00:00:00 tonyg) Origins of Credit-based Flow Control and Acks, functional this time
  ** (2011-05-24 10:13:33 tonyg) Message buffer size should be determined by arrival-time jitter  :IDEA:
  ** (2011-05-24 10:14:08 tonyg) Fine-grain scheduling in a distributed system using PLLs :IDEA:
  * TODO Build an imperative workalike os.rkt that uses real threads  :PROJECT:
  * TODO Upload ~/src/racket-kademlia
  * TODO racket-rc4: RSA, DSA, DH, ECDH, ECDSA, etc
  * TODO Thank-you notes for xmas gifts!
  * Old, done to-do items
  ** DONE Configure Flashbake and git-syncing for Uni
  ** DONE Write presentation
  ** DONE View mini-DVD and write up evaluation
  

  Some of the journal entries have gone on to become blog posts here.

  The document lives in a git repository, and a git commit is executed by cron every five minutes. I have checkouts of the repository on the two or three machines I use most frequently. I make extensive use of a variant of Emacs’ time-stamp feature:

  (defun stamp ()
    (interactive)
    (insert (time-stamp-string)))
  

  … which inserts text like 2019-05-19 13:15:43 tonyg when I run M-x stamp.

• A second such document, very similar, that also includes slightly more in the way of private or personal information, that I don’t have checkouts of on as many machines.

• A paper journal, which I use when I need the different style of thinking it affords. The freedom to draw sketches and rough lines connecting thoughts is useful from time to time. I use a nice fountain pen that a friend gave me, even though it smudges horribly because I’m left-handed.

  

• A Google doc that is a project-specific journal for one of my main projects, Syndicate. It’s a Google doc because I share it with various collaborators, and because I occasionally want to put pictures in the file. Otherwise it’s similar in feel to the main org-mode document I use: a record of thoughts, ideas and workings-through.

In every case, the documents function as append-only logs of thoughts and workings-through. I draw on them when digesting and summarising in later write-ups and in writing actual software. They’re mostly useful as an audit log, for finding out what I was thinking or what I did in the past, or for trying to reconstruct an argument.

The electronic documents are searchable, of course. It’s inconvenient that they are in different places, and I sometimes don’t know which of the small number of documents has the item I am looking for, but it’s not too unmanageable.

The paper documents are a different story. I intend eventually to photograph each page of my paper journal as a kind of backup, though I haven’t yet started doing so. Indexing that archive will require a bit of work too.

About two years ago I wrote an Erlang-style Actors implementation for Squeak Smalltalk, based on subclassing Process, using Smalltalk’s Message class to represent inter-actor messages, and using Promise for RPC. Roughly a year ago, I finally dusted it off, documented it, and released it.

It draws on my experience of Erlang programming in a few ways: it has links and monitors for between-actor failure signalling; it has library actors representing sockets; it has a simple tracing facility. There’s crude and no doubt heavily problematic support for basic Morphic interaction.

Installation instructions, comprehensive documentation and tutorials can be found at https://tonyg.github.io/squeak-actors/.

It’s by no means as ambitious as other Smalltalk Actor systems: it only deals with single-image in-image messaging between actors, and doesn’t have the E-style ability to refer to objects within a vat. Instead it follows Erlang in having references denote actors (i.e. vats, roughly), rather than anything more fine-grained.

Next steps could be:

• a Workspace that was actor aware, i.e. each Workspace an actor.
• better Supervisors.
• tools for visualizing the current constellation of actors, perhaps based on Ned Konz’s Connectors?
• an ActorEventTrace subclass that is able to draw message interaction diagrams as a Morph.
• a screencast of building an IRC client maybe?

To give it a try:

1. Download and run a recent version of Squeak. For example, I just downloaded https://files.squeak.org/trunk/Squeak5.3alpha-18431-32bit/Squeak5.3alpha-18431-32bit-201810190412-Linux.zip.

2. Update your image. Click the Squeak icon in the top left of the window, and choose “Update Squeak”, or execute the following in a workspace:

   MCMcmUpdater updateFromServer
   

3. Install the Actors project into your Squeak:

   (Installer squeaksource project: 'Actors') install: 'ConfigurationOfActors'
   

4. Follow the documentation, which includes tutorials of various levels of complexity and a detailed user manual,

It could in principle work in Pharo, as well. I did try to port it to Pharo, but found two main obstacles. First, Pharo doesn’t have an integrated Promise implementation; the Actors project makes heavy use of promises. Second, I couldn’t get Pharo’s sockets to behave as reliably as Squeak’s. I don’t remember details, but I’d be very pleased if a Pharo expert were to have a try at porting the code across.

The project has recently been discussed on HN; please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, comments or feedback.

Smalltalk is three things in one. It is a language; it embodies a language design idea; and it is an operating system.

Learning Smalltalk gives you three things:

1. An understanding of Smalltalk, the language. This is least essential. It’s also the kind of thing you can pick up in a single 30-minute session.¹ The language is tiny and simple.

2. An understanding of the design idea, uniformly object-oriented programming. This is crucial and will connect with other styles of programming including Actor-based and pure-functional. This is something you will never get from Java, which is not a uniformly object-oriented language.

3. An understanding of a completely different and (these days) unusual way of designing an operating system. An object-oriented operating system, to boot. The IDE, the debugger, and the other tooling all integrates to give a level of manageability in many ways far superior to e.g. Unix or Windows.

After a while, you may find yourself discovering subtle things about the interplay between the three aspects of Smalltalk that you can then apply in your own designs. For example, Smalltalk is a “dynamic” language, but the way classes and methods are arranged is very rigid, giving a lot of static structure to the system organisation. This static structure is what unlocks the powerful tooling, and is what simplifies the programmer’s mental model to make the system understandable. Comparable OO and almost-OO languages, such as Python, have a more “dynamic” system organisation, making it harder to write tools for automatically manipulating Python systems and making it harder for programmers to understand how Python code, data, state, and processes come together to form a running program image.

Yesterday, I became inspired to learn about the kinds of generalized, pure-functional getters and setters that the FP community calls “optics”: Lenses, Prisms, Folds, Traversals, and so on.

I quickly realised that I needed to brush up on some of the core typeclasses involved, namely Functor and Applicative. I spent the rest of the day reading up on the laws and definitions involved.

Brent Yorgey’s Typeclassopedia and Miran Lipovača’s Learn You A Haskell were both great starting points. The latter for the basics, some good examples, and lots of context-setting and motivation, and the former for completeness, concision, and connections to the other foundational ideas in the Haskell standard library.

Applicative laws vs. Monoidal laws

The laws for Applicative functors are complicated, and have obscure, largely unhelpful¹ names like “homomorphism” and “interchange”.

The laws for Monoidal functors are simple and familiar: just left and right identity, and an associativity law.

However, each set of laws implies the other!

The two formulations are equivalent. I spent most of yesterday evening proving this, as suggested by the exercises in the Typeclassopedia section dealing with Monoidal functors.

The main thing I learned from this exercise is that the Applicative laws are self-contained. They imply the Functor laws, the Monoidal laws, and the “naturality” law all by themselves. By contrast, the Monoidal laws are not self-contained: in order to derive the Applicative laws, you need appeal to the Functor and “naturality” laws from time to time.

On the one hand, the Applicative laws are ugly, but self-contained. On the other hand, the Monoidal laws are cleanly factored and separate from the Functor laws. But on the gripping hand, programming with Applicative is reported to be much less of a pain than programming with Monoidal. I believe it!

All this suggests that choosing the Applicative formulation over the Monoidal one makes sense when designing a language’s standard library.

After all, proving that an instance of Applicative respects the laws can be done either in terms of the Applicative laws or the Functor+Monoidal laws, meaning that not only does the programmer have the better API, but the implementor has a free choice of “proof API” when discharging their proof obligations.

A handy lemma

Another result of working through the proofs was discovery of this handy lemma:

pure f <*> u <*> pure h = pure (flip f) <*> pure h <*> u

It’s intuitively obvious, and something that I think many users of Applicative will rely on, but it took a bit of thinking to realise I needed it, and a little more thinking to get the proof to go through.

(Exercise: Imagine replacing pure h with v. Why does the new statement not hold?)

Onward to Foldable, Traversable, Lens and Prism

I think today I’ll read the rest of the Typeclassopedia, with particular focus on Foldable and Traversable. If I have time, I’ll get started on Lens.