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A cool recent Smalltalk VM based directly on Smalltalk-80 and closely following the classic “Blue Book” design, but somewhat modernized and implemented in Rust. Straighforward and understandable.
Squeak is a direct descendant of the Smalltalk-80 system. Lots to criticise, lots to be inspired by. One of my favourite operating systems, one of my favourite programming languages! Not that it couldn’t be better, of course…
The OOPSLA 1997 paper that introduced Squeak, a Smalltalk implementation “written in itself”:
Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.
The paper discusses the bootstrapping process, the VM’s object format and garbage collector, the Smalltalk-subset-to-C translation process, the implementations’ approach to the BitBlt graphics primitive, performance, and the fledgling Squeak community. The latter is still going strong thirty-some years later.