Strongtalk: A High-Performance Smalltalk With An Optional Type System | Hacker News Reader

Strongtalk: A High-Performance Smalltalk With An Optional Type System

strongtalk.org

38 pointsluu13 comments

I'm still a little angry that Smalltalk was essentially abandoned for Java. If Smalltalk VM work had proceeded with the funding, and at the pace, of the Java VM, we'd all be far, far better off. We watched it happen with jaws on the floor.

Many of the Strongtalk team went over to write the Java VM at Sun. So Hotspot owes a great deal to Strongtalk.

And from there onto V8 and now Dart. Lars Bak, Gilad Bracha, Peter Ahé, and Srdjan Mitrovic are all working on Dart now. Robert Griesemer is also at Google, working on Go.

Interesting. I still haven't figured out where Dart actually fits or is especially useful as compared to say Java or Go. Does anyone have a good explanation on Dart?

It's sort of a cross between Javascript and Java. At the moment a lot of the effort is focused on creating (client side) web apps where Javascript is used now, though the team is also working on the server side.

The language feels a lot like Javascript with the warts removed and with optional typing. What's interesting is that the team consists of people with a ton of experience in writing VMs (Strongtalk, Hotspot, V8). This means many of the language decisions were chosen so they were easy to make fast. In practice this means things are sometimes less dynamic than in Javascript.

This means many of the language decisions were chosen so they were easy to make fast.

This is a big part of how Smalltalk was designed as well. The motivation back then was just to have a powerful OO system that would run fast enough...ish. I've seen emulations of those early Smalltalk systems. The slow reputation came from there.

I suspect the same sort of thinking went into the design of Lua.

I work on Dart, and find it much nicer to use than either Java, JavaScript or Python, my main languages before taking up Dart. I think it's a great general purpose language and even though it's starting focused on web apps, it'll be great for servers and command line script.

It's faster, more sane, structured and readable than JavaScript with classes, mixins, sane this and type coercion behavior and statically analyzable semantics.

It's much less verbose than Java, with libraries, top-level functions, getters and setters, implicit interfaces, cascades and more.

And surprisingly to me when I started, I like it better than Python. It's more consistent and feels more lightweight, and it's a lot faster than CPython.

The last release of Strongtalk was in 2006. What advantages does this language provide over other versions of Smalltalk that have been updated more recently? (For example, GNU Smalltalk was updated a year ago.)

Optional types. It's literally says in the thread title.

Mixins. High performance interpreter. High performance JIT compiler with dynamic inlining.

On the other hand, it doesn't run on anything but ancient versions of Windows, so it's not useful except as a source of inspiration.

Binary distributions are only available for Microsoft Windows 32bit. Last updated in 2005. This is more of a historical curiosity than a potential tool.

Well, the project has seen some activity since, apparently:

http://code.google.com/p/strongtalk/source/list

Is there a programming environment as well?

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