Long-overdue updates

[Brian Rice]

Hello all,

I'd like to revive the Slate project from dormancy in the last very  
quiet year, and would just like everyone to know that major overhauls  
of the project or code are totally acceptable if it means making it  
viable again. Most importantly, run-time improvements for memory  
management (generational GC, weak pointers, or manual memory  
management support) and the VM (threaded-code vs. bytecode, and most  
importantly, dynamic method inlining). Also, if someone wants to just  
take the reins and go change things relatively drastically, I will  
support that.

I've fixed up the main site homepage to correctly describe what we  
want to have environment-wise, compared to Self/Strongtalk: same  
optimizations, but self-hosted and in a simpler architecture. I've  
also hopefully more accurately described the current state of the  
project.

I'm attempting to get the alpha repository to run all build targets  
without end-user tweaking. I'll set up some automation so that I can  
track this down with minimal effort from here on. I will probably  
remove the main/alpha repository distinction for simplicity's sake,  
so that it's as simple as possible for a visitor to arrive and get a  
usable system.

In other news, I've finally learned how to write web applications  
over the last year, so it'll probably be a lot easier for me to  
improve the liveliness and feature set of the website.

Suggestions are quite welcome. I'll update as replies on this thread.

--
-Brian
http://briantrice.com