It just received an award from the ACM SIGPLAN Dynamic Language Symposium, and it's a great paper.

One of my favorites, up there with the original "Self" papers.

The approach it describes to layering the Smalltalk VM on top of the JavaScript VM has worked out quite well thanks to the way JavaScript VMs have evolved.

Here's the text of Vanessa's tweet:

https://x.com/dynlangsym/status/1856748088708210924

Dynamic Language Symposium @dynlangsym

This year's DLS Most Notable Paper award goes to:

SqueakJS: A Modern and Practical Smalltalk that Runs in Any Browser

by @codefrau, Dan Ingalls, @timfelgentreff, @krono, and Robert Hirschfeld.

Congratulations to the authors!

Read the paper here: https://freudenbergs.de/vanessa/publications/Freudenberg-201...

Association for Computing Machinery

Most Notable Paper Award

Dynamic Languages Symposium

SqueakJS: A Modern and Practical Smalltalk that Runs in Any Browser

Vanessa Freudenberg, Dan Ingalls, Tim Felgentreff, Tobias Pape, Robert Hirschfeld

This paper reports on SqueakJS, a fully compatible Squeak/Smalltalk implemented in pure JavaScript. In 2014, it demonstrated that with thoughtful implementation techniques, browsers and their JavaScript VMs can enable applications as dynamic and interactive as Smalltalk environments. Furthermore, the paper details how powerful programming language features such as object enumeration, application snapshotting, custom graphics interfaces, as well as basic file abstractions can be realized inside the browser environment.

Today, SqueakJS continues to be used in education, for web applications, and as environments to preserve important parts of Smalltalk’s history, and with it, computing history.

Laurence Tratt, Program Chair DLS’14

Stefan Marr, Steering Committee Chair

2024 Dynamic Languages Symposium, the premier forum for researchers and practitioners to share research and experience on all aspects on dynamic languages.

Here's the previous HN discussion from 2015 soon after it was published:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982251

Don, love your Postscript work!

> One of my favorites, up there with the original "Self" papers.

Interesting. Why?

I mean, you just implement a bytecode interpreter in JS and run that.

> layering the Smalltalk VM on top of the JavaScript VM has worked out quite well

How has this worked out well?

The VM described is ~100 times slower than the already not so super-fast Squeak bytecode interpreter. The only reason this works at all is that machines today are ridiculously fast.

It pains me that we waste all this incredible performance on ridiculous amounts of layering.

This paper was written in 2014, right before the major ES6/ES2015 upgrade of JavaScript - arrow functions with lexical scoping, promises, destructuring, many other features. Has SqueakJS been updated due to these newer features, has it improved the code?

This work has opened up many possibilities over the years - who would have thought that https://github.com/ErikOnBike/CodeParadise/blob/master/READM... was possible? Running a tiny image in the browser courtesy of SqueakJS is viable and very productive.