I had already known what going to a 64 bit architecture meant to Gemstone Smalltalk as far as scalability thresholds. That in itself is amazing. What I had not realized was all of the rest that comes with the 64 bit release. It quite a lot of stuff. I won’t recap here but rather one can find the presentation here at our Yahoo groups web site. If you are not a member, you will have to join but that takes a second. The other interesting note is that it seems that Gemstone would like to be the StORE repository of choice for VisualWorks. VW and Gemstone are a natural fit. StORE on the other hand currently expects to have an RDMS as its backend. Cincom seems to be making moves to fronting that with GLORP which is basically an offshoot of TopLink an O-R mapping framework. Btw, the lead architect for GLORP was also one of the lead architects for TopLink, an interesting framework in its own right. It would not seem that a Gemstone / StORE marriage is likely anytime soon. We’ll have to just wait and see how it plays out. Perhaps a CampSmalltalk project can get this off the ground.

Finally, another interesting tidbit is that, if I recall correctly, now something like 20% of the world’s transportation is running using VisualWorks/Gemstone Smalltalk. Maybe one of our members recalls the exact number quoted. Feel free to correct me.