Smalltalk in a C world

Smalltalk, in spite of myriad advantages in terms of ease of development, has been largely eclipsed by lower-level languages like C, which has become the lingua franca on modern systems. This paper introduces the Pragmatic Smalltalk compiler, which provides a dialect of Smalltalk that is designed from the ground up for close interoperability with C libraries. We describe how high-level Smalltalk language features are lowered to allow execution without a virtual machine, allowing Smalltalk and C code to be mixed in the same program without hard boundaries between the two. This allows incremental deployment of Smalltalk code in programs and libraries along with heavily optimised low-level C and assembly routines for performance critical segments.

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