We are happy to announce that based on the work of Glenn, Alex extended Bloc (Sparta) to work directly in the Morphic world using Cairo as a backend.

Cairo is less powerful than Moz2D (see the screenshot below for an example), but the implementation addresses a concern that the community raised regarding a perceived increased liability due to the dependency to Moz2D. Essentially this means that Bloc can be treated as another graphical library that can coexist with Morphic without requiring any external VM plugin.

I would also like to point out that adding a new backend and host was possible because of the many iterations (including throwing away whole implementations) that Alex and Glenn went through. I think they did an amazing job.

You can find a bit more details about Bloc here:
http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/bloc-flexible-backends-hosts/

Another issue raised regarding Bloc was that of the engineering effort required to make it a reality. That is why I would also like to announce that Alex joined feenk.com where he is primarily working on the graphical stack for Pharo.

Cheers,

Doru