A brief list of Strongtalk papers

strongtalk.md

In considering where Objective-C could go, it's worthwhile to start by understanding the work that's already been done.

Below are a selection of papers from Gilad Bracha's 1990s work on Strongtalk, an extension of Smalltalk (from which Objective-C's design derives) with (among other things), stronger type-safety tooling.

What's interesting (to me, anyway), is that the work done on the Self/Strongtalk VM in the early 90s was actually bought by Sun and became the modern Java VM. When Google got started on their V8 JavaScript runtime, guess who shows up again — Lars Bak, who was the technical lead for both the Strongtalk and HotSpot Java VMs.

If we're going to be talking about how to apply "modern" (1990s!) ideas to Objective-C, we'd be wise to review the considerable work done in considering those sorts of problems in a Smalltalk-derived universe, and lifting whatever good ideas we can, and discarding whatever ideas have been superceded in the intervening decades.

• Modules as Objects in Newspeak (2010)
• Mixins in Strongtalk (2002 - ECOOP02 Workshop on Inheritance)
• The Strongtalk Type System for Smalltalk (1996 - OOPSLA96 Workshop on Extending the Smalltalk Language.)
• Extending Smalltalk with Mixins (1996 - OOPSLA96 Workshop on Extending the Smalltalk Language.)
• Strongtalk: Typechecking Smalltalk in a Production Environment (1993 - ACM Conf. on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications)
• The Programming Language Jigsaw: Mixins, Modularity, and Multiple Inheritance (1992 - Gilad Bracha PhD thesis, University of Utah, 1992)

@mpw

Ready agreement on all fronts. Of course, part of why Strongtalk was never used in anger was the redirection of efforts towards the JVM.

I think we're seeing a renaissance of the idea that one can implement higher-level languages efficiently using ahead-of-time compilation, as well as tempering of the notion that JIT would eventually achieve better performance than AOT by virtue of being able to apply reversible, usage-specific optimizations, etc.

I dare say that outside of deployments where bytecode portability trumps all other considerations, the VM focus is (or out to be) largely dead.

All that said, we should be mining as much as we can of the language design that has already been done, and in that regard, we should be looking at contemporary languages, too.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll review Ian Piumarta's slides when I have a chance.