
Strongtalk: A High-Performance Smalltalk With An Optional Type System - luu
http://strongtalk.org/index.html
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davelnewton
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.

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

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munificent
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.

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programminggeek
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?

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hencq
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.

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stcredzero
_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.

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inetsee
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.)

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

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cwp
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.

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

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e12e
Well, the project has seen some activity since, apparently:

[http://code.google.com/p/strongtalk/source/list](http://code.google.com/p/strongtalk/source/list)

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endlessvoid94
Is there a programming environment as well?

