Squeak doesn't run on Mac OS Sierra

Question

Currently, I want to learn Smalltalk to understand more about object oriented programming, and I have spent quite some time to find the tutorials to learn it. Finally, I decided to go with Squeak. I downloaded the all in one package 64 bit at the website http://squeak.org/. Then, run it. The thing is it launches, but I can't find a menu at all. I just can see the options like: about Squeak, hide others, hide squeak, and quit squeak. Moreover, I can't even quit the application, it just hangs there. I have been searching and know that the reason is because I've updated my Mac OS to Sierra, and trying to find a way to make it work, but haven't got any real result so far. I really wanna learn this great programming language. My ultimate goal is I wanna follow the tutorial here http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/ after understanding the basic foundation of Smalltalk. Therefore, it would be great if anybody can help me here.

Answer 1

The problem has been brought up on the squeak-dev mailing list some time ago and the accepted solution there [1] was to run the Squeak image with a more recent (but possibly less stable) version of the Virtual Machine. Automatically built VMs can be downloaded at https://bintray.com/opensmalltalk/vm/cog/. The specific version pointed out in the thread on the mailing list is no longer available, so you should try another one that comes after 201610042023.

[1] http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Does-Not-Run-on-MAC-OS-Sierra-tp4918570p4918576.html

For reference, this issue in OpenSmalltalk VM on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/issues/39

Answer 2

In MacOS Sierra, Apple decided to break some APIs and wrote a bad release document describing that they did so. As a result our current VMs broke and we found out during the beta. As a result of the bad documentation it took some time to find and then fix the problem. The new vms are fixed.

Answer 3

The issue raised by @Richard Eng still seems to persist in Squeak5.3. I do have a working 5.3 image and VM but now forget how I got it to work.