Tomorrow Maurice Rabb will present Microlingua at NYC Smalltalk. Microlingua is a Smalltalk dialect being designed for “resource constrained” environments i.e. its about embedding Smalltalk. I have been interested in embedded Smalltalk for quite a while. Smalltalk has quite a history in the embedded space. As most of us Smalltalkers know Tektronics had built an oscilloscope that ran Smalltalk. I don’t recall the exact time period but it must have been at somewhere in the early 90’s i.e. it was one of the first stories I heard when I started coding in Smalltalk which was back in 94. OTI , before they went over to the dark side, had embedded Smalltalk. I recently heard that HP had done similar work, The “network” car that IBM showcased at one of the earlier Java Ones was actually running Smalltalk to do the low level interactions with the vehicle while Java was only being used for the UIs. Some of the members of the NYC Smalltalk, myself included, met with the then president of the American division of OTI and over some Jack and cokes , were told about prototypes that Porshe was working on and how the developers would actually debug while driving the car. We were provided with some licenses and I played with the environment for a bit including playing with QNX a real time operating system. Another embedded Smalltalk that we got exposed to was PocketSmalltalk, an environment designed to run on a Palm pda. One of our members at the time, Steve Harris, was very much into PocketSmalltalk and presented a few times on the topic.

So what is new in the embedded Smalltalk space? Let’s see:

• OOVM — This is/was a Smalltalk embedded environment which was recently demonstrated at Smalltalk Solutions earlier this year. However, they have been acquired by a Java company so I am not sure what is available and in what form. Apparently, there is currently nothing that can be downloaded.
• Cincom VisualWorks PocketPC vms are now available.
• WISP , not sure what the status of that is. Maybe somebody can comment on this.
• PocketSmalltalk — There is still a site but it seems inactive.
• SmalltalkMT — not really for embedded applications but SmalltalkMT can generate very small executables and is used in PC gaming.

I’ll make time to make an entry in the NYC Smalltalk wiki for this topic. BTW, anybody interested in coming to the meeting can find details on our wiki.