Gnu Smalltalk on macOS Monterey 12.6.3

[Werner Heigl]

Dear all,

Over the past two weeks I have been trying to get gst-blox or gst-browser to 
work without success. I have given up on gst-browser because I can’t find 
libgtk2-dev for the Mac. Besides, Tk gives me the Mac look-and-feel.

Running get-blox from the terminal seems to work, at least I can see an entry 
in the menu bar at the top of the screen. The ‘About’ window works and looks 
very nice:



Trying to open any of the top three menu items in the ’Smalltalk’ menu doesn’t 
do anything. Issuing a ‘Smalltalk—>File in…’ results in this error:

Object: nil error: did not understand #rootView
MessageNotUnderstood(Exception)>>signal (ExcHandling.st:254)
UndefinedObject(Object)>>doesNotUnderstand: #rootView (SysExcept.st:1408)
BLOX.BLOXBrowser.Prompter class>>openFileName:default:in: 
(BLOXBrowser.star#VFS.ZipFile/ModalDialog.st:108)
BLOX.BLOXBrowser.BrowserMain class>>fileIn 
(BLOXBrowser.star#VFS.ZipFile/BrowserMain.st:139)
DirectedMessage(Message)>>sendTo: (Message.st:113)
DirectedMessage>>send (DirMessage.st:95)
BLOX.BMenuItem(BLOX.BMenuObject)>>invokeCallback 
(BloxTK.star#VFS.ZipFile/BloxBasic.st:2995)

In general, gst-blox keeps the CPU load high for some reason.



I think that Gnu Smalltalk is really good and it would be a pity if it goes 
stale. And without the browser you kind of miss the Smalltalk experience, all 
the while the competition has it working on all major platforms.

I’m willing to help but would need some pointers on where to start looking. And 
if anyone has managed to get the GUI stuff working on a Mac please let me know.

Thank you,

Werner Heigl