Strongtalk: A high-speed Smalltalk with incremental, optional strong typing

strongtalk.org

58 points·david-given··5 comments

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I was looking at Strongtalk the other day for the first time in some years.

Unfortunately, it isn't clear at all where to best obtain the sources.

Since Google Code is going read-only soon, it would be nice to have a canonical location outside of there.

In 2010, there was a post on the mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/strongtalk-general/S...

But that GitHub repo has been idle since 2010:

https://github.com/talksmall/Strongtalk

It seems other people have also tried exporting from Google Code to GitHub as well:

https://github.com/szKarlen/strongtalk https://github.com/rvedam/strongtalk https://github.com/rmacnak/strongtalk https://github.com/Michaelangel007/strongtalk https://github.com/DmitryVSkiba/strongtalk https://github.com/emanuelpeg/strongtalk https://github.com/liutanyu/strongtalk

At that point, I got distracted and moved on to something else of interest at the time.

It'd be really interesting to know whether the StrongTalk type checker could be bolted on to an existing Smalltalk implementation, or whether it was inextricably part of the JIT.

Smalltalk is a lovely, lovely language; being able to combine Smalltalk's dynamism with strongly-typed code where it makes sense looks like the best of both worlds (it even supports generics!).

http://www.bracha.org/nwst.html

I believe that the Strongtalk compiler eventually became HotSpot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongtalk

And most of those people now work on V8 and Dart.

imho, the V8 runtime and the Chrome Dev Tools give a good enough approximation of a Smalltalk "live-coding" environment.

Given that approaches like Typescript, Flow and the most likely adoption of type hinting in a coming ES201x version, I would consider that JavaScript is a "spiritual" successor of Strongtalk.

Sorry Dart, you're just talking too long ;)

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