I did my Master’s work on Smalltalk (a debugger), but you don’t hear much about it these days. Nevertheless, folks are still working with it. Case in point, Strongtalk: A Fast, Strongly-Typed Smalltalk (Windows-only, sorry). Some of the technology used to make it fast has been incorporated into Sun’s HotSpot VM, of course, the strong-typing probably helped. They also have an interesting overall compliation technique unlike older implementations.
I wonder how it compares to Squeak, feature-wise (I would suspect Strongtalk to be lot faster, obviously). I’ve used Squeak a bit, and it’s a great implementation, check it out since it runs on multiple platforms. It’s great for learning, and their site offers a lot of support for educational uses.
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