Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself

  • Authors:

  • Dan Ingalls;Ted Kaehler;John Maloney;Scott Wallace;Alan Kay

  • Affiliations:

  • Walt Disney Imagineering, 1401 Flower Street, P.O. Box 25020, Glendale, CA;Walt Disney Imagineering, 1401 Flower Street, P.O. Box 25020, Glendale, CA;Walt Disney Imagineering, 1401 Flower Street, P.O. Box 25020, Glendale, CA;Walt Disney Imagineering, 1401 Flower Street, P.O. Box 25020, Glendale, CA;Walt Disney Imagineering, 1401 Flower Street, P.O. Box 25020, Glendale, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to. debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk-mutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk.