Little Smalltalk is a version, or dialect, of Smalltalk that does not conform to the Smalltalk-80 standard. Little Smalltalk has been around for about 40 years.
In 1984, Dr. Timothy Budd of Oregon State University released the first version of Little Smalltalk. It was a very simple, command-line system. It ran well in small amounts of memory. Though it is not fast, it is very simple and it is complete.
Over the next ten years Dr. Budd updated and upgraded Little Smalltalk. The final standalone version was version 4.0 released in about 1994. He went on to create Small World, a version based on the Java VM.
The version here is based on changes I made in 2000-2003 and combines some changes made by Andy Valencia. I added some primitives to do basic TCP socket operations and wrote a very minimal class browser/editor web IDE.
Lightly tested on:
v4.7.1 - released 20221211 - By Kyle Hayes.
v4.7.0 - released 20200612 - By Kyle Hayes. Many changes:
v4.6.1 - released 20181207 - by Kyle Hayes. Made into CMake project.
v4.6.0 - released 20130515 - by Kyle Hayes, ported to 64-bit, clean ups etc.
v4.5.0 - released 2002? - by Kyle Hayes
v???? - released by Andy Valencia (found in 2002 but done earlier than that)
v4.0.0 - released (not fully released) 1994 - by Dr. Timothy Budd, OSU.
v3.0 - released ? - by Dr. Timothy Budd, OSU. (The book, "A Little Smalltalk" is based on this version.)
v2.0 - released ? - by Dr. Timothy Budd, OSU.
v1.0 - released ? - by Dr. Timoth Budd, OSU.
Dr. Budd has indicated to me that he is abandoning the restrictions of the original copyright. The message follows:
Return-path: <budd@ghost.CS.ORST.EDU>
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Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 05:49:42 +0000 (GMT)
From: Tim Budd <budd@CS.ORST.EDU>
Subject: Re: Little smalltalk
To: kyroha@pacbell.net
Message-id: <200001150549.FAA16044@oops.CS.ORST.EDU>
Status: RO
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well, I haven't touched LST since 94, you are welcome to any sources to
do whatever you wish with it.My version from 2001 was under the GPL. I felt that this was the closest license to the spirit of Dr. Budd's original. However, it became apparent that the license was a problem when I look back over the last decade. There have been other forks, but none based on my original version 4.5.
I have relicensed the code under the 3-clause BSD license (see the file LICENSE).
I have attempted to preserve the original goal of Little Smalltalk as a very simple system that provides a part of the functionality of a Smalltalk-80 system without the overhead and complexity. My original goal in using LST was to add a specific X Windows widget set to it to allow GUI programming. Instead, I conceived the idea of using a web browser as the front-end and making LST into a tiny web server that would serve pages that implemented a simple code browser and editor.
I modified the LST VM to support rudimentary sockets and added a very basic class browser (but not editor). That was in early 2001. Then LST languished again for over a year. In mid 2002, I found references to a Tiny Smalltalk by Andy Valencia (of VSTa fame).
I found Tiny Smalltalk and discovered that it was actually a modified version of Tim Budd's original LST 4.0. I do not know who did the modifications for certain, but I think it was mostly Andy Valencia.
Andy's version (or those he borrowed from) had a several nice features that I had seriously thought about, but had not persued. Andy had converted LST to work under VSTa (or so it seemed from the code). I removed most of the OS-specific changes in order to make it work under Linux.
In addition, Andy was working on both a disassembler for bytecode and a command line debugger. I have not used either and do not know if they work.
Some very rudimentary benchmarks showed that Andy's version was nearly an order of magnitude faster than the one I'd been hacking on (I did not do a comparison against the original LST 4.0). I suspect that I slowed my version down somewhat compared to the original, but Andy's non-boxed Integers certainly helped things. I'm not sure about the change in Dictionary implementation. The method cache seems to work fairly well with a high hit rate (I don't remember the exact figure, but better than 95% I think...). So, method lookup is generally not that much of the overhead.
I took my changes to the original LST and merged them with those that Andy's version had. The result I called LST 4.5. That is the base for this release.
It isn't done or even half-baked, but it is an amusing little toy now.
I have included an archive of all the versions I could find. These were collected by
Danny or Charles over time. Please see the archive directory and the README therein for
more information and individual versions.
Russell Allen has been updating SmallWorld, Budd's Java port of Little Smalltalk. Please visit his GitHub repository SmallWorld for the most recent version. As of the last update to this README, that was 2015.
Note: if you have an original copy of Parla and can share it, please let me know! The version I had in the archive was a copy of the Wayback Machine web page and not the original source. I have not been able to find a copy on the Internet.
Little Smalltalk is not fast. Not fast at all compared to modern JIT-powered VMs for Java and Smalltalk. However, it is very small and very accessible. It is a good tool to learn how to do a complete language implementation including garbage collection, compiling, interpretation, bootstrapping etc.
It is a basic bytecoded VM with bytecodes much like those used in other languages. The VM implements a simple stack-based execution environment for compiled Smalltalk code.
The base image has about 3400 objects. The web IDE has about 5200 objects. The interpreter executable is smaller than L2 cache on most recent CPUs and smaller than L1 on some.
There have been several new features added since Dr. Budd's original 4.0 release.
fileIn and fileOut methods. This is a major change from earlier versions. (Kyle Hayes)
I added a basic class browser initially in about 2001. Later I started adding more and more functionality to the browser including buttons to save the image automatically to a numbered image file.
The class browser is roughly functional. The following are implemented (though usually in a very basic way):
It is ugly! No attempt at any CSS or other styling has been done. Many parts are very rough. Debugging code is still enabled.
The long term goal is to implement a StringTemplate class that support something like Mustache templates. This is underway but not at all ready to use to replace the existing HTML builder classes.
The build is based on CMake.
make a build directory in the root:
$> mkdir builddecend into the build directory and run CMake:
$> cd build; cmake ..watch the pretty output. If all goes well, you should end up with several files.
lst - this is the main Little Smalltalk binary.bootstrap - this program is used to build the initial images.lst_repl.img - this is the command line REPL image. It contains about 3400 objects.lst_webide.img - this is the web-based IDE image. It contains about 5200 objects.Copy the executable lst and at least one of the images to a directory where you want to work.
$> ./lst ./lst.img$> ./lst ./webide.imgIf you run the web IDE, you will need to start your browser and point it at http://localhost:6789. There is a basic Do It implementation at http://localhost:6789/do_it
Little Smalltalk is very basic. It is a toy. It is not suitable for production use. All that said, it is a great way to understand how a self-hosted object oriented language is make.
If you run across any bugs, please let me know by opening a GitHub issue. If you determine how to fix the bug, even better!
Have fun!
Kyle Hayes kyle.hayes at gmail.com