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Conclusion
As far as we know, Squeak is the first practical Smalltalk system written in itself that is complete and self-supporting. Squeak runs the Smalltalk code describing its own virtual machine fast enough for debugging purposes: although it requires some patience, one can actually interact with menus and windows in this mode. This is no mean feat, considering that every memory reference in the inner loop of BitBlt is running in Smalltalk.
To achieve useful levels of performance, the Smalltalk code of the virtual machine is translated into C, yielding a speedup of approximately 450. Part of this performance gain, a factor of 3.4, can be attributed to the inlining of function calls in the translation process. The translator can also be used to generate primitive methods for computationally intensive inner loops that manipulate fundamental data types of the machine such as bytes, integers, floats, and arrays of these types.
The Squeak virtual machine, since its source code is publicly available, serves as an updated reference implementation for Smalltalk-80. This is especially valuable now that the classic Blue and Green Books [Gold83] [Kras83] are out of print. A number of design choices made in the Blue Book that were appropriate for the slower speed and limited address space of the computer systems of the early 1980's have been revisited, especially those relating to object memory and storage reclamation. Squeak also updates the multimedia components of this reference system by adding color support and image transformation capabilities to BitBlt and by including sound output. While Squeak is not the first Smalltalk to use modern storage management or to support multimedia, it makes a valuable contribution by delivering these capabilities in a small one-language package that is freely available, and that runs identically on all platforms.
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