Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix
summary
Claims an actual toolchain extension and runtime rather than vague philosophy: a wrapper that captures DWARF metadata at compile time, an LD_PRELOAD runtime (called lialo) and a liballocs-style inspector that maps arbitrary pointers to types. Demonstrations show attaching a debugger to an X11 clock to change its timezone, dynamically loading libraries into a Node process, and calling C functions without hand‑written FFI. It mostly works (demo hiccups noted); remaining work centers on cross‑heap tracing, GC interoperability and exposing JITed code as native metadata.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (4)
related talks
46mAvoiding Pitfalls in C Extensions
33mDecent into Darkness: Understanding Your System's Binary Interface...
39mWhat lies beneath the beautiful code?
49mKeynote: Simple goal. Hard to accomplish
20mScripting with Luerl
40mWorst. Ideas. Ever.
50mLinux loves Ruby, Ruby loves Linux
34mStanding on the Shoulders of Giants