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Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

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Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#21

Post by klibertp »

tudorgirba wrote: post #20
klibertp wrote: post #17

I'd love to give it a try. However, Pharo still doesn't run out of the box on my Fedora system. It used to work, up to Pharo ~5-6, then stopped working altogether. There's little documentation around installation and even less info on troubleshooting. I'd love to like Pharo, but it simply doesn't work, and nobody cares :( From my memories of it, even when it was still starting properly, it worked... Well, some of the…

Glamorous Toolkit build the VM differently from Pharo. Please give the distribution a try: https://gtoolkit.com/download/

Oh, OK, I'll try. Thanks for letting me know! :)

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#22

Post by tudorgirba »

doix wrote: post #18
brian_cloutier wrote: post #4

This recent video does a good job of illustrating some of the power of what they've built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJhfTUSDlR0 I find the gtoolkit interface a little clunky in a way I can't quite describe but the core ideas are fascinating: - if you're looking at a compiled method it's trivial to switch between different representations: you can easily look at the original source or the AST or the bytecode. I…

It's really interesting to see all of this visualized. I used to do a subset of these things when I used to reverse engineer games. Reverse engineering all the object structures, injecting a DLL, pointing at those objects and then exposing them via lua or angelscript. Maybe making an interactive REPL like thing so I could play around with things. I wonder if instead of binding to lua/angelscript, you could instead so…

You can already connect Glamorous Toolkit to JS and Python to work with objects exposed by their runtimes :)

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#23

Post by doix »

tudorgirba wrote: post #22
doix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting to see all of this visualized. I used to do a subset of these things when I used to reverse engineer games. Reverse engineering all the object structures, injecting a DLL, pointing at those objects and then exposing them via lua or angelscript. Maybe making an interactive REPL like thing so I could play around with things. I wonder if instead of binding to lua/angelscript, you could instead so…

You can already connect Glamorous Toolkit to JS and Python to work with objects exposed by their runtimes :)

That's a different use case, where you have access to the source. I'm more thinking for exploring memory objects of games (that we don't have the source access too) to visualize the relationship between the objects in the game and help teach reverse engineering and memory models.

A lot of (some?)people are interested in modding games (with no mod support), but have no understanding of C/C++ or memory models. Trying to explain the levels of indirection of all the objects is difficult without visualization.

Are you the author? Where does the connection to the JS/Python runtimes happen? I looked through the github repos, but I am _very_ far out of my depth. I wanted to see what the API looked like, maybe it's something that could be implemented fairly easily.

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#24

Post by klibertp »

tudorgirba wrote: post #20
klibertp wrote: post #17

I'd love to give it a try. However, Pharo still doesn't run out of the box on my Fedora system. It used to work, up to Pharo ~5-6, then stopped working altogether. There's little documentation around installation and even less info on troubleshooting. I'd love to like Pharo, but it simply doesn't work, and nobody cares :( From my memories of it, even when it was still starting properly, it worked... Well, some of the…

Glamorous Toolkit build the VM differently from Pharo. Please give the distribution a try: https://gtoolkit.com/download/

It worked! Not sure why or what's the difference, but Pharo downloaded from here: https://pharo.org/download still doesn't work - it opens a window but never draws anything in it, it's stuck showing whatever was below it and never updates.

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#25

Post by poulpy123 »

jalk wrote: post #7
brian_cloutier wrote: post #4

This recent video does a good job of illustrating some of the power of what they've built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJhfTUSDlR0 I find the gtoolkit interface a little clunky in a way I can't quite describe but the core ideas are fascinating: - if you're looking at a compiled method it's trivial to switch between different representations: you can easily look at the original source or the AST or the bytecode. I…

Why spend days of actual work when you can spend years automating / customizing your workflow

this is my curse actually

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#26

Post by andybak »

disago wrote: post #19

I struggled initially to understand what this was about. Then, after digging a little bit more, I see that it is an open and rich environment to visualize (while executing) data from different perspectives while being extensible from within the same environment (using Pharo), allowing to create a rich and custom ecosystem for data and systems exploration in an orderly and structured manner. What I couldn't find is in…

Thank you.

As someone who gets distracted way too much I usually require that a project can demonstrate why it might be interesting at a glance and this one failed pretty hard.

Luckily it was on HN so I could come to the comments to see if it was worth looking into more deeply - but ideally it should be able to do that by itself.

My choices were either 37m video - or a bunch of text that seemed too abstract and didn't explain "what this does" in a concise, down-to-earth manner.

Also mentioning "Smalltalk" would have been a really useful thing. The fact it sounded Smalltalky and I vaguely remember reading about Pharo was my only clue. The minute I understood this was related to Smalltalk a lot of other things fell into place.

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#27

Post by seandenigris »

doix wrote: post #23
tudorgirba wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already connect Glamorous Toolkit to JS and Python to work with objects exposed by their runtimes :)

That's a different use case, where you have access to the source. I'm more thinking for exploring memory objects of games (that we don't have the source access too) to visualize the relationship between the objects in the game and help teach reverse engineering and memory models. A lot of (some?)people are interested in modding games (with no mod support), but have no understanding of C/C++ or memory models. Trying t…

Wow, I love the idea of using GT for reverse engineering. That would’ve been life-changing for my last experience, where I worked mostly in a hex editor. The context switching and slow feedback cycle were brutal. Documenting my growing understanding/implementation with live custom visualizations would’ve been awesome. Unfortunately, that was twenty years before I discovered GT!

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#28

Post by seandenigris »

jalk wrote: post #7
brian_cloutier wrote: post #4

This recent video does a good job of illustrating some of the power of what they've built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJhfTUSDlR0 I find the gtoolkit interface a little clunky in a way I can't quite describe but the core ideas are fascinating: - if you're looking at a compiled method it's trivial to switch between different representations: you can easily look at the original source or the AST or the bytecode. I…

Why spend days of actual work when you can spend years automating / customizing your workflow

Ugh, do I fall into that rabbit hole often! The thing with GT, though, is that the cost of creating visualizations is so low - a few seconds - that it’s rarely a distraction

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#29

Post by user3939382 »

I tried running this, maybe 4? months ago when it was posted on HN. I use JetBrains + PHP.

After two hours of trying to follow incomplete instructions, downloading special IDEs and plugins, hunting for alternatives to dead links, etc, I gave up on the process.

Re: Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

#30

Post by tudorgirba »

doix wrote: post #23
tudorgirba wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already connect Glamorous Toolkit to JS and Python to work with objects exposed by their runtimes :)

That's a different use case, where you have access to the source. I'm more thinking for exploring memory objects of games (that we don't have the source access too) to visualize the relationship between the objects in the game and help teach reverse engineering and memory models. A lot of (some?)people are interested in modding games (with no mod support), but have no understanding of C/C++ or memory models. Trying t…

Indeed, I am one of the authors :).

The connection to other runtimes happens through an instantiating of a more generic proxy model. The same mechanism also enables us to connect with debugging interfaces as well. So, if you have a way to get the memory layout from a runtime, it should certainly be possible to play with it in GT.

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