Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release

(via Slashdot). The initial developer release of Croquet, the Smalltalk-based distributed computing environment, is now available.

It's different enought that I don't really know what to make of it - is this the future? Or a testbed for ideas that will find more durable expression in another context?

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Re: Croquet

Dominic Fox: The initial developer release of Croquet, the Smalltalk-based distributed computing environment, is now available. It's different enought that I don't really know what to make of it - is this the future? Or a testbed for ideas that will find more durable expression in another context?

I'll have to take a look at it later, but off the cuff, my guess would be the latter. Unless something has changed in terms of Squeak's primitives, included libraries, and even architecture, I find it difficult to believe that Croquet will be as durable or important as something built on E or Oz. In particular, I don't expect Croquet to get security right unless they rewrite it around Squeak-E, and it's not clear to me what the Croquet programming model is, whereas one can quickly get a handle on the distributed programming model of Oz just by reading (big chunks of) CTM, and Oz is also pursuing object-capability security.

OTOH, I wish Croquet all possible success, because it looks like a nice potential proof by demonstration that scalable real-time virtual worlds are feasible without having to have the server farms of a Second Life etc.

Croquet SDK 1.0 Released

Very Interesting News!

It's funny... just a few days ago a colleague asked "What's Smalltalk?" This will be a great thing to point him to. I look forward to playing with it. Thanks!