Strongtalk Is Open Sourced
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Strongtalk is a version of Smalltalk developed with speed in mind. It was developed by a startup but the company was bought by Sun to work on the JVM before Strongtalk was productized.
Strongtalk allows optional static typic. Interestingly, the static typing information is not used by the optimizer to produce fast code. Instead, Strongtalk uses run-time profiling, which is now adopted in the Hotspot JVM.
Given the similarities between Smalltalk and Python, I guess one can build a very speedy Python in Strongtalk.
However, it is not a particularly useful strategic move for Python. Python’s weakness right now is in its library size (true!) in comparison to the Java and .Net framework libraries.
On the other front, it’s not competitive against PHP’s shared-nothing architecture, which makes virtual hosting attractive. Strategically, Python’s full potential lies dormant until it’s VM and library is retooled to support locking down, and purging of modules so that one VM can be recycled for use by many requests.
Tell me what you think!
Via Avi Bryant
technorati tags:smalltalk, strongtalk, python
