Thursday – 14:00-14:45
Convention Ctr - Exhibit Hall 4A

22 – The Strongtalk System: A Fast, Strongly-Typed Smalltalk

Lars Bak

The Strongtalk system is a fundamental rethinking of Smalltalk-80. While maintaining the basic syntax and semantics of the Smalltalk-80 language, it contains significant advances in a variety of areas relative to previous Smalltalk implementations, including:

1. a virtual machine that executes Smalltalk considerably faster than any other implementation
2. the first complete strong, static type system for Smalltalk (use of which is completely optional and incremental, and which does not affect performance), as well as a typed Blue Book library
3. a flyweight, glyph-based user interface that nonetheless allows integration of native widgets, and which provides automatic layout using Tex-style shrink/stretch semantics
4. use of mixins to provide a simple, elegant alternative to multiple inheritance.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has recently released the Strongtalk system as free, unsupported software under a partially open-source license for the benefit of researchers and Smalltalk implementers. This demonstration will give them an opportunity to talk with a founder of the Strongtalk project, and see the system in action.