The Java HotSpot Performance Engine is one of the most sophisticated process virtual machines (VMs) available and used by millions of Java developers

Smalltalk with the GraalVM

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2021-08-07 16:00:10

The Java HotSpot Performance Engine is one of the most sophisticated process virtual machines (VMs) available and used by millions of Java developers every day. If we go back in the early history of HotSpot, not many people may know that HotSpot was initially built by the same team that worked on Strongtalk, a strongly-typed Smalltalk environment as its name suggests. In case you’ve never heard of Smalltalk: it’s both a programming language and a programming system created by a research group led by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. Although the community today is quite small compared with those of more mainstream programming languages, Smalltalk systems such as Squeak/Smalltalk, VisualWorks, Pharo, or GemStone/S are still widely used in research and industry to this day.

One of the most interesting developments in current virtual machine research, on the other hand, is the GraalVM project. GraalVM is a high-performance virtual machine based on HotSpot and comes with support for multiple programming languages. At this point, I’m sure you’ve already figured out what this blog post is about: running Smalltalk on the GraalVM!

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