Category:Smalltalk: Difference between revisions

Over time, various implementations ("dialects") of Smalltalk have appeared, some of which target different audiences and/or focus on particular applications.

Their internal implementation (evaluation mechanism) may also differ radically, from bytecode interpretation, just-in-time compilation, dynamic optimizing recompilation to cross-language translators (Smalltalk-to-C, Smalltalk-to-JavaScript, Smalltalk-to-Java). There are also systems which use a mix of static recompilation and dynamic recompilation.

Dialects differ in their class libraries, although a common subset exists which is ANSI standardized. Some class libraries are huge, containing 100k+ methods in the base system alone, others are minimalistic.

Most differences are in their graphic and windowing interface libraries (which are typically wrappers to underlying OS facilities, the window system or a browser).

===Is it an IDE, a Scripting Language, a Compiled Language or what?===

Well, all of it. Most Smalltalks, when started come up with their own builtin IDE to work inside the so called 'image'. That is the state of all objects (not only classes!) which can be dumped at any time and restarted later. The image includes editors, compilers, apps and everything.

But many Smalltalk can also be started without a UI in. scripting mode (usually by a command line argument), and will then behave like a classic title="Read-Eval-Print-Loop">REPL</abbr>-based scripting language, reading and evaluating expressions (it should be emphasized that this is probably the least efficient use of Smalltalk, as you'll miss all the fancy IDE support...).

There is also (at least one) [[Smalltalk/X | Smalltalk]], in which you can work in the image (with incremental change and just-in-time compilation of entered code), but where you also generate stand alone pre-compiled executables for apps.