Hi Guido,

I disagree with your claims.
I am not in the office & read news irregular therefor my late answer.

Dolphin has an excellent Development GUI & a clean patternized framework.
It is the best of all Smalltalk frameworks that I have seen.
This is also why I proposed to Andy to use our VM for the next generation
Dolphin.
Dolphin's VM is very well written & also the feature richest of all VM's
commercially available.

Please dont compare commercial Sts with free Sts. They are different & I
will not explain what need to be done to improve OS SW.
Sq or Ph may have a large community but what counts for me is first my
customer.

I have no advantage if a large community uses my technology & ideas &
incorporate my technology in OS Sts.
Also the Dolphin customers have no advantage if we am not sucesssful with
getting my customers applications running on DNG.
We need to be
(1) technical successful
(2) financial successful

with DNG
than we can think how to get more customers

If step 1,2 is successful then next steps can be taken.

yes it would be nice to have DNG 32/64 on X86 & ARM, and also for Linux. I
dont care much what other Sts have or claim to have.
most of free St work is prototypic & CANNOT be used in production - result
of free is minor quality.

It would not help me if our VM is OS - & it would not help our customer nor
the community.

What is commercial needed is a maintained VM & framework which is guaranted
to be adopted to the changing SW world.
And the SW world is not changing by having a lot of short live crap OS ware.
If people like to do business in OS world they can do- but not I.
We see today a strong Win7 market - its success based in Win32/Win64
transitioning to Win64 - that's why there was a big interest to have
Dolphins VM
ported to Win64. I do not want to argue about necessity of 64 Bit - my only
argument is integration of Dolphin into Win64

But I like to develop DNG with a small number of experts & customers first.
We will not accept any vendor or tech lock-in into DNG - but we define a
clean interface to other runtimes ( e.g .NET & Java )
We will not accept technology flow of our work into the OS Sts
But technology is luckily exposed by the core technology - the Dolphin & the
DNG VM

DNG round 0 & Dolphin 7 have both a sophisticated VM & are based on the D6
St frameworks which is based on the WinX API.

iPhone or G1 is a totally different market. It would be nice to have Dolphin
or DNG apps running here - but our customers needs are not this devices.
This can change and than we can react with technical clean & robust
solutions.

So what will be in a year ? We will have a robust DNG & hopefully D7. We
will have a number of industry apps running on DNG.
And on the OS Sts - maybe some other forks achieving better modularization &
better GUI - Are full blockclosures already supported ?

It is nice that we have OS Smalltalks but they are commercially irrelevant.

Take the comparison with car technology - a VW Polo & a Daimler can be used
to
drive from A to B. But I prefer to use a Daimler & I need to deliver
excellent work for my customer to be able to buy the next Daimler & this I
do since I was 22 years old. If I would stick to the OS world I would
probably move from A to B soon or later in a huge Daimler car called "bus".

Frank
P.S back to VM development - tomorrow is an important next internal DNG
release date & I need to test ...