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<P>For those of you who have heard of Strongtalk (or if you haven't, but<BR>you
care about performance in Smalltalk, or type systems), there is<BR>great news
today:</P>
<P>Sun Microsystems has at long last released the Strongtalk<BR>virtual-machine
as Open Source! This means the entire Strongtalk<BR>project is now fully
Open Source, under a basically unrestricted<BR>Berkeley-style license, at <A
href="http://www.strongtalk.org/">http://www.strongtalk.org/</A>.</P>
<P>As many of you may remember, Strongtalk was (and still is) the
fastest<BR>implementation of Smalltalk ever. It also included the only
fully<BR>developed type-system for Smalltalk (use of which is optional,
and<BR>doesn't affect performance). The VM is based on Urs Hölzle's
highly<BR>advanced type-feedback compiler technology, from the Self project
at<BR>Sun Labs. It was developed in the mid-'90s by a startup,
Animorphic<BR>Systems, a startup company, but was shelved when Sun bought
Animorphic.<BR> At Sun the Animorphic team based the design of the current
(HotSpot)<BR>Java VM on the Strongtalk VM. But Strongtalk sat on a
shelf, not<BR>quite finished.</P>
<P>In 2002, Sun released Strongtalk with a non-commercial binary of
the<BR>unfinished VM, with open source just for the
associated<BR>Smalltalk/Strongtalk libraries. But without the VM source
code to<BR>allow finishing and maintaining the VM, Strongtalk couldn't
go<BR>anywhere, other than as a historical proof that you really can
make<BR>Smalltalk run very fast, and that you can put a static type-system
in<BR>Smalltalk without ruining the feel of Smalltalk.</P>
<P>Now, with the release of the VM source code, there's nothing
stopping<BR>anyone from doing anything with the Strongtalk system, and using it
for<BR>basically any purpose. This would also open the possibility that
other<BR>Smalltalk implementations could borrow from the technology. To
whet<BR>your appetite, imagine something like Squeak running on a VM that
is<BR>many times faster. We don't want to compete with other Smalltalk
VMs-<BR>we just want Smalltalk to run a lot faster, however that has to
happen.</P>
<P>To keep our feet on the ground, this is a very sophisticated,
complex<BR>system that is not fully finished, so there is a huge amount of
work<BR>required, by people with deep knowledge of VMs, to finish it or
adapt<BR>the technology to VM designs. But before it was
impossible. Now,<BR>what happens is entirely up to the Smalltalk
community!</P>
<P>Many thanks to Gilad Bracha at Sun for persevering and making this<BR>happen,
to Sun for releasing it, and to Robert Griesemer for helping<BR>figure out how
to get the VM building again after 10 years on a shelf.</P>
<P>-The Strongtalk Team </P>
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