Squeak

Squeak is a modern, open source, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.

When Smalltalk was created more than 35 years ago it defined the term object orientation and is the first language in which everything is built from objects. Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from especially Simula, Sketchpad and Lisp and even today Smalltalk sets the bar for object oriented dynamically strongly typed interactive languages and environments.

You may be familiar with other open source languages like Ruby or Python, but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a true uniform fully reflective environment – real live objects.

"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas."

- Alan Kay

Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students, business application developers, researchers, music performers, interactive media artists, web developers and many others. We use Squeak for a wide variety of computing tasks, ranging from child education to innovative research in computer science, or creation of advanced dynamic web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based Seaside framework.

The Squeak kernel sports:

• A largely Smalltalk-80 and ANSI Smalltalk X3J20 compatible language and base libraries
• A fast virtual machine written in a subset of Squeak
• A bit identical compact 32-bit direct pointer object memory
• An efficient incremental hybrid generation scavenging mark and sweep garbage collector supporting bulk-mutation of objects
• A virtual machine plugin system with plugins for most parts outside the core like networking, file I/O, sound and graphics
• Bit-identical execution including graphics on all major computing platforms including most versions of Windows, MacOS and Unix/Linux, OS/2 Warp and RiscOS. And if your platform wasn’t included in that list, Squeak is easy to port.

On top of this there are class libraries and virtual machine plugins for very advanced multimedia including anti-aliased 2D and accelerated 3D graphics, real-time sound and music synthesis, MPEG2 video and much more. In addition, Squeak has one of the most advanced fully reflective development environments ever created with over 600 addon packages available for single click download and installation.

The entire Squeak system is open source software, distributed freely with a liberal license.