BACK TO THE FUTURE - THE STORY OF SQUEAK, A PRACTICAL SMALLTALK WRITTEN IN ITSELF

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virt ual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator p roduces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to com mercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a comp act object format that typically requires only a single word of overhe ad per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector fo r 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk-mutation of objects; extensio ns of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and antialiased image rotati on and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entire ly in Smalltalk.