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What is the difference in Squeak / Pharo / Newspeak Smalltalk VM?

I saw 3 different virtual machines while learning Smalltalk. This is Squeak / Pharo / Newspeak. What is the difference between the two?

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The virtual machine for Smalltalk is quite simple. It contains a set of primitive instructions that directly reference Smalltalk code. This makes the virtual virtual machine easy to connect. Therefore, Squeak is often used to experiment with a virtual machine.

Pharo is a project to replace the Squeaks core library, as Squeak's appearance is somewhat outdated. It uses Squeak VM and is mostly compatible, but the interface is completely different.

On the side of the VM Squeak there is a vanilla VM. As far as I know, this started as part of the Squeak project and is still in use.

Then, some time ago, Eliot Miranda, a researcher at VM, announced that he was developing a new optimized virtual machine for Squeak. Cog is open source and can be used with Squeak and Pharo. It is still actively developing, but faster than the underlying virtual machine.

Newspeak is a completely different animal. This is an experiment to create a language that uses a clean message passing as the only primitive of the language. It is based on Squeak VM, but not really Smalltalk. You can find more information about this at http://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html .

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Squeak and Pharo are different Smalltalk dialects, and Newspeak is a different language, albeit inspired and in many ways similar to Smalltalk and Self.

As for Squeak and Pharo, since Pharo is a Squeak fork, they both work on the same virtual machine, they depend on one set of VM commands and a set of primitives.

As for the Squeak and Pharo virtual machines, there are several versions, but the 2 most important types are the classic VM violin and the new jog-based Cog virtual machine. But both of them perform the same set of commands as a whole.

While we are on sqeak and pharo virtual machines, you are interested in hacking your own VM, sources are available and recorded in a subset of Smalltalk, and there is a toolbox that allows you to make changes and create your own virtual machine. There is a large series of posts from Mariano Martinez Pekka that describes how to play with VMs here, this is an introductory post:

http://marianopeck.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/journey-through-the-vm/

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Both Squeak and Pharo still share the same virtual machine. Newspeak has its own, which come from Squeak VM.

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