Objective-Smalltalk on Linux via GNUstep and Docker

Although Objective-Smalltalk's architectural orientation should be an ideal fit for The Cloud™, this has been largely theoretical in recent times as Objective-Smalltalk only ran on macOS and iOS.

Having used both GNUstep and Cocotron to port, for example, MusselWind to Linux in the past, I knew this wasn't an insurmountable probl...er opportunity. However, dealing with VMs and OSes, and configurations getting everything to compile was always painful, and usually not reproducible.

Enter Docker for Mac. I had obviously heard quite a bit about Docker, but so far never had an opportunity to actually try it out in anger. Well, maybe not "anger", more "mild chagrin", because Docker is not really meant for running Linux binaries on your Mac. However, it does that job really, really well. Instead of futzing around with VMs, dealing with special guest OS tools in order to get window sizes to match, Retina not working, displays not resizing etc. you just get a login onto a Linux "box" right in your Terminal window, no muss no fuss. Nice. And mounting directories from the Mac is also trivial. Niiiice.

The other part that makes this different is the whole idea of reproducibility via Dockerfiles. Because a container is at least conceptually ephemeral (practically you can keep it around for quite a bit), you don't capture your knowledge in the state of the VM you are working on. Instead, you accumulate the knowledge in the Dockerfile(s) used to construct your image.

The Dockerfile for creating a GNUstep image/container that is capable of compiling + running Objective-Smalltalk can be found here:

https://github.com/mpw/MPWFoundation/tree/master/GNUstep/gnustep-combined

The main Dockerfile loads first loads a bunch of packages via apt-get:

---

FROM ubuntu

ENV LC_ALL en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANG en_US.UTF-8
ENV TZ 'Europe/Berlin'
RUN ln -snf /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime && echo $TZ > /etc/timezone


RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git \
    make \
    ssh \
    sudo \
    curl \
    inetutils-ping \
    vim build-essential  \
    clang llvm libblocksruntime-dev libkqueue-dev libpthread-workqueue-dev libxml2-dev cmake \
    libffi-dev \
    libreadline6-dev \
    libedit-dev \
    libmicrohttpd-dev \
    gnutls-dev 


RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash gnustep

COPY install-gnustep-clang /home/gnustep/
RUN chmod u+x /home/gnustep/install-gnustep-clang
RUN /home/gnustep/install-gnustep-clang  

COPY bashrc /home/gnustep/.bashrc
COPY profile /home/gnustep/.profile
COPY bashrc /root/.bashrc
COPY profile /root/.profile
COPY bashrc /.bashrc
COPY profile /.profile

COPY build-gnustep-clang /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang
RUN  mkdir -p /home/gnustep/patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/
COPY patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/objcxx_eh.cc /home/gnustep/patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/objcxx_eh.cc

RUN chmod u+x /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang
RUN /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang  


COPY build-gnustep-clang /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang
RUN  mkdir -p /home/gnustep/patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/
COPY patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/objcxx_eh.cc /home/gnustep/patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/objcxx_eh.cc

RUN chmod u+x /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang
RUN /home/gnustep/build-gnustep-clang  

CMD ["bash"]

---

It adds a user "gnustep", then runs a script that will downloads specific version of the gnustep and libobjc2 sources using a script, patches one of those sources which wouldn't compile for me and finally builds and installs the whole thing using another script, both adapted from Tobias Lensing's post.

---

#!/bin/bash
#


cd /home/gnustep/

echo Installing gnustep-make
export CC=clang
echo compiler is $CC

tar zxf gnustep-make-2.7.0.tar.gz
cd gnustep-make-2.7.0
./configure
make install
cd ..

echo 
echo 
echo ======================
echo Installing libobjc2


tar zxf libobjc2-1.8.1.tar.gz
cp patches/libobjc2-1.8.1/* libobjc2-1.8.1/
cd libobjc2-1.8.1
mkdir Build
cd Build
# cmake -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang -DTESTS=OFF -DLLVM_OPTS=OFF  ..
cmake -DTESTS=OFF .. 
make install
cd ../..


cd gnustep-make-2.7.0
make clean
./configure --with-library-combo=ng-gnu-gnu
make install
cd ..

source /usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh
tar zxf gnustep-base-1.25.1.tar.gz 
cd gnustep-base-1.25.1
./configure
make installn
cd ..

echo Installation script finished successfully

---

One of the tricky bits about this is that you need to install the gnustep-make package twice, first to get libobjc2 to install, the second time with libobjc2 installed so all the other packages find the right runtime. The apt-get packages did not work for me, because I needed newer compiler/runtime features.

Once you have the image, you can start it up and log into it. I then su -l to the gnustep account and work with the MPWFoundation, ObjectiveSmalltalk and ObjectiveHTTPD mounted from my local filesystem, rather than having separate copies inside the container.

Not everything is ported, but basic expressions work, as does messaging back and forth between Objective-Smalltalk and Objective-C, Higher Order Messaging, etc. Considering some of the runtime trickery involved, I was surprised how straightforward it was to get this far.

In the future, I expect to also build a runtime image that has the libraries and executable pre-built.