Smalltalk Meets .NET

By Martin Heller

May 12, 2003

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Last September, in honor of Smalltalk's 30th birthday, I touched on the history of Smalltalk, the Smalltalk language itself, and three implementations: Squeak, IBM Visual Age Smalltalk, and SmallScript. As you recall, SmallScript includes S#, a superset of the Smalltalk language, and supports using S# in mixed-language environments. A status update (dated 4/24/03) on the SmallScript site says:

The S#.NET release preparation is proceeding steadily along. The AOS.NET.dll supporting S# on .NET is finished and provides both runtime services and full reflection services for the S# compiler. The current work is focused on the VS.NET integration shell and related S# and .NET browser services.

In the weeks following that article, I learned more from readers about current Smalltalk implementations like Cincom's, as well as about Camp Smalltalk, and was reminded many times that Simula predated Smalltalk as an objected-oriented programming language.

Just the other day, I discovered that S# isn't the only Smalltalk implementation targeting the .NET Framework. #Smalltalk isn't quite as ambitious as S#, but it's still pretty interesting.

#Smalltalk

The #Smalltalk site tells us:

The #Smalltalk compiler implements Smalltalk to run natively on the .NET framework. It was written by John Brant and Don Roberts and is available under the Open Software License version 1.1.

The #Smalltalk compiler allows you to use classes from ordinary .NET programs. In fact, many of the standard ANSI Smalltalk classes provided by #Smalltalk are just wrappers around standard .N

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