OpenCroquet

So, what'd y'all think?

It looks very nice, but I fail to see why you make a big deal of it being implemented with a high-level language.

Everything is made with high-level languages these days. Very few just use assembly these days.

This CroquetGL, while an impressive project, is based on a Smalltalk-type language combined with OpenGL. It doesn't differ significantly from from a C# or Java program using OpenGL. It seems to me that it could have been implemented in any language, really.

CroquetGL appears quite an achievement, but for reasons not relating to the language of its implementation. Good programs aren't dependent on which language is used, but rather the insightfulness, resourcefulness, and intelligence of the designers and programmers.

I'm curious how well it runs, seeing that it is fairly graphic-intensive.

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Original post by MonkeyCookie It looks very nice, but I fail to see why you make a big deal of it being implemented with a high-level language.

Some people seem to think that only C and C++ (and maybe C#) are suited to do 3D work.

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Everything is made with high-level languages these days. Very few just use assembly these days.

Yes, but Smalltalk is very high-level with garbage collection, dynamic typing and all. We're farther up (in my opinion) than C.

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It seems to me that it could have been implemented in any language, really.

Actually, the author think not. They needed a language where they could access the VM and compiler source and they needed late binding. I think they explain why on the site. And also, I don't think C or C++ would've been serious options: if you're mixing 3D and collaborative work and all that, it's probably a good thing if you don't need to worry about memory allocation problems and all that.

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CroquetGL appears quite an achievement, but for reasons not relating to the language of its implementation. Good programs aren't dependent on which language is used, but rather the insightfulness, resourcefulness, and intelligence of the designers and programmers.

I agree, but one of the guy on this team is Alan Kay himself. This year, he won the Turing award. He is responsible for modern object-oriented programming, Smalltalk, the laptop, the over-lapping graphical user interface and he has worked on projects such as the laer printer, Ethernet, ARPAnet, client/server applications, etc. He is truely a pioneer of computing and I think that OpenCroquet could really influence companies in the future.

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I'm curious how well it runs, seeing that it is fairly graphic-intensive.

I'm not sure. It says in the FAQ that any two year-old computer should be okay and that a GeForce 2 is plenty to run it. I remember a live demo with Alan and David A. Smith: Alan had a cheap, 2 pound Japanese laptop and David had an iBook. That's another thing by the way: Squeak runs bit-indentical on every platform (there's about 30 of them), so Croquet will (theoratically, because I have my doubt about such a complex beast) work on all those platforms given that OpenGL and OpenAL are available.

By the way, you can see a somewhat dated demo of Croquet (the last two videos) on this site: http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html