Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

ParcPlace spun off from Xerox to sell the original Smalltalk in 1988 but they sold that to Cincom in the late 1990s: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/

Cincom had previously tested the waters by buying another Smalltalk called Object Studio.

IBM sold its VisualAge Smalltalk to Instanciations: https://www.instantiations.com/products/vasmalltalk/index.ht...

Apple had the original PARC Smalltalk but never did anything with it until it evolved into Squeak in 1996, which was Apple's very first open source product. Later two forks went in different directions: Cuis and Pharo. https://squeak.org/ https://cuis-smalltalk.org/ https://pharo.org/

Forking Little Smalltalk (an early open source text based Smalltalk) is a rather popular thing to do, so I won't give all the links. A bit more sophisticated is GNU Smalltalk: https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/

I consider Self to be Smalltalk, though not Smalltalk-80: https://selflanguage.org/

There are Smalltalks based on Javascript, as well as an alternative VM for Squeak and friends: https://www.amber-lang.net/ https://squeak.js.org/ http://u8.smalltalking.net/

There are probably a few that I missed that are still in use.



Are there any quality implementations for Java or .NET VMs? One would think that this is the easiest way to get a high-quality GC today. And both ecosystems have some special sauce in them for dynamically typed languages - DLR in .NET, and I'm not sure if there's a single brand for that in Java land, but they've been busy adding features for the likes of JRuby for a while now.


Not having used them myself, I can't comment on the quality of the JVM based Smalltalks:

http://www.redline.st/

https://github.com/hpi-swa/trufflesqueak

Another project that I watched without trying myself was for .NET:

https://refactory.com/sharp-smalltalk/

There was also Essence# but it doesn't seem active.


> Apple had the original PARC Smalltalk

They had V1; the image provided by http://www.wolczko.com/st80 which the VM referenced in this post is based on is V2.

> There are probably a few that I missed that are still in use.

Here is one that works on the original (unmodified) Xerox image: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk


Dolphin Smalltalk is still being developed and is open source now: https://github.com/dolphinsmalltalk/Dolphin


Right, Dolphin is still around. It seems that so is Smalltalk/X (which I used in the early 1990s), but there are now two versions:

https://www.exept.de/en/smalltalk-x.html

https://swing.fit.cvut.cz/projects/stx-jv

And I should have remembered Gemstone/S:

https://gemtalksystems.com/

Since I mentioned Little Smalltalk I should also have pointed out another educational system:

http://som-st.github.io/




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: