Smalltalk in a C world

Abstract

A modern developer is presented with a continuum of choices of programming languages, ranging from assembly languages and C up to high-level domain-specific languages. It is very rare for a single language to be the best possible choice for everything, and the sweet spot with an optimal trade between ease of development and performance changes depending on the target platform.We present an interoperable framework for allowing code written in C (potentially with inline assembly), Objective-C, Smalltalk, and higher-level domain-specific languages to coexist with very low cognitive or performance overhead. Our implementation shares an underlying object model, in interpreted, JIT-compiled and statically compiled code among all languages, allowing a single object to have methods implemented in any of the supported languages. We also describe several techniques that we have used to improve the performance of late-bound dynamic languages.