Using Arch Linux, Self is installed, but there are no messages

Question

I downloaded Cinnarch and have it running on a virtual machine. I tried to install Self, only to find that it was already installed. So I tried playing around with it, but there's a problem. Numbers, strings, etc. work, but I can't send any messages. I can't add 1 + 1. The only advancedish thing I've been able to accomplish is make new objects. What can I do to get my Self system fully working?

Answer 1

Self is similar to Smalltalk in that you need both a virtual machine, and the default distribution of objects. There are a very small number of default primitive methods, and a parser built into the VM itself to help bootstrapping. You need to get the Self equivalent of the standard library/environment.

You can either:

1. go to http://selflanguage.org/download/index.html and download a .snap file, then start it by running Self -s filename.snap A snapshot is a frozen collection of objects like a Smalltalk image file.
2. Clone the sources from https://github.com/russellallen/self, cd into the objects directory and run Self -f worldBuilder.self This will build the default snapshot from source. If you want to open a GUI development environment, do 'desktop open'.

Either way should get you to a prompt which gives the right answer to 3 + 4.