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codefrau
SqueakJS
JavaScript2014–2026
codefrau / SqueakJS

SqueakJS

A Squeak Smalltalk VM in Javascript

7Distinct people
8Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
411GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A Squeak Smalltalk VM in Javascript

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

Interesting post, but could use a [1995] in the title. For those that are interested in some radical proposals to try and move things forward, I recommend having a look at the…

e12e used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-03-24 12:42:39 UTC to 2026-09-22 10:44:40 UTC.

0122014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

8 sources
I have a confession: This summer I downloaded a 2014 ACM conference paper from the Internet Archive, opened the PDF, changed the author's name on the title page, changed the email address, changed a GitHub URL in a footnote, rewrote the Author field in the file metadata, and put the altered file on the internet. The paper is Vanessa Freudenberg's SqueakJS paper (DLS '14). She died in 2025. In 2024 the same paper won the SIGPLAN DLS Most Notable Paper Award, credited to Vanessa. Every public copy of the PDF still had the name she no longer used: ACM, dblp, Semantic Scholar, and every Wayback snapshot of the file on her own site. Same bytes. No corrected edition had ever existed. She had already said, on this site, what she wanted. In 2021 she replied to me about Dan Ingalls's HOPL Smalltalk paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125
Read the rest
515 >Dan published an updated version of that paper here: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk.... Would be great if you could cite that one next time. The main improvement for me is not being deadnamed. There are other corrections as well. Dan had quietly put out a corrected PDF of that paper while she was alive, outside the publisher's version of record, because the official copy was too slow to say her name. I did the same thing for the one paper he could not: hers. The coding agent (Fable, in Cursor) did the search and proved the negative. It proposed the two institutional paths: petition ACM under the name-change policy, or ask her co-authors to re-typeset from LaTeX. It would not propose opening the published PDF and changing the bytes. I had to tell it to. Two trained rules collided. Do not tamper with a historical document. Do not leave a deadname sitting there. The first one won until a human who knew her pushed. I then wrote down why that push was legitimate, and put the constraints into a reusable skill so the next agent can mention the option with the rules attached, instead of hiding it. All five, or do not do it: The subject asked, in their own words, or someone with standing acts on that record. The original file stays bit-for-bit, hashed, in the same directory. Every change is listed in a README and in a Note inside the PDF. The filename says what the file is. The publisher correction is pursued in parallel; the edited file is a bridge, not a replacement of the record. Drop any one of those, and the same edit is just a silent substitution. Doing it right is the part Gwern is pointing at when he says there is no everyday Photoshop for PDFs. TeX does not store a name as a string. It stores a TJ array with kern numbers between syllables, so ordinary grep never sees it. The Times subset on the byline happened to contain every glyph for "Vanessa"; we still had to recompute the V-a kern and shift the Td so the line stayed centered over her affiliation. The sans subset used for the email ended at glyph 117, one code point short of the letter v. That font literally could not spell her name. We set the line in Helvetica, sized to match, and resized the link annotation so the clickable box fit the new URL. Fable did not stop at the byte edit. It rendered page 1 with Ghostscript, cropped the header, and looked at the pixels with machine vision. The first pass was beautiful and wrong: the byline said Vanessa, the email underneath still said the old address. The next pass put the new email in Times, which rendered clean and was the wrong family. It swapped in Helvetica, recentered, and zoomed to 220 dpi next to the neighboring authors until the line sat quietly with theirs. That loop is why the file does not look like vandalism. The original and the memorial edition sit next to each other. ACM's copy is still uncorrected. Option 3 of their name-change policy is the canonical fix; her co-authors are the right petitioners. Her comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125515 The 2021 thread, preserved: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... Dan's corrected HOPL paper, the one she asked us to cite: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk.... The unaltered 2014 PDF (Wayback; her site is down): https://web.archive.org/web/20250119071632/https://freudenbe... Memorial edition: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... Original, hashed, beside it: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... Every edit enumerated: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... The case, including the nudge: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... Why the agent would not propose it, and the five conditions: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... How the bytes were changed (Ghostscript and vision at minutes 68-84): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... Renders and kerning: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/presto... The change-name skill (scan, discuss, edit, verify, publish): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/change-... PDF playbook: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/change-... ACM version of record (still the old name): https://doi.org/10.1145/2661088.2661100 ACM name-change policy: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author-name-change... SqueakJS, where she moved the repo: https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS Remembering Vanessa: https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
In PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)
Help/Useful Expressions has some EToys instructions. The Squeakland images stopped getting upograded when Squeeak went 64-bit (I think). You can get a "halo" on any object, click the Inspector icon (the eye) and create an etoys script from there. Also, under Extras/Themes and Colors there is a Set Etoys Mode option. You can try that but, it didn't work last night. Lastly, files.squeak.org/etoys has a 6.0beta image you can download. Drop the image/changes into SqueakJS [1] (that is the only way to run a 32bit image). [1]https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS
In Squeak 6.1
So there is [1] https://squeak.js.org/ and [2] https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS which seems to be able to not only run Squeak, but also [3] https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/wiki/Ru... and [4] https://github.com/carolahp/pharo to shrink and adapt these images to be able to run on common JS-runtimes in acceptable speeds and memory usage. There is also [5] https://caffeine.js.org/ and [6] https://github.com/ErikOnBike/CodeParadise bidirectionally <=> bridging the gap between Smalltalk and JS even more, with [7] https://www.webcomponents.org/ I think it should be possible to port, maybe to even have some hypercard-like visual website builder/explorable explanations thing.
In Fabrik – A Visual Programming Environment (1988)
I recently started looking into what's new with Pharo Smalltalk and associated projects since last I had a look... There are many that are underrated, like the new(ish) cog virtual machine: https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm Cuis Smalltalk: https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev SquakJS: https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS and it's inspiration, lively: https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel A vr community tool/framework for the web in the spirit of open croquet / openqwaq: https://github.com/virtual-world-framework/vwf And last, but not least: https://github.com/moosetechnology/Moose "Moose is an extensive platform for software and data analysis. Moose is an open source software. It was started at the Software Composition Group from University of Bern in 1996, and is currently contributed to and
Read the rest
used by multiple partners. It offers multiple services ranging from importing and parsing data, to modeling, to measuring, querying, mining, and to building interactive and visual analysis tools."
In Ask HN: What is the most underrated GitHub repo you found lately?
e12e·Mar 24, 2014Recommendation phrase
Interesting post, but could use a [1995] in the title. For those that are interested in some radical proposals to try and move things forward, I recommend having a look at the work that's being done at the Viewpoints Research Institute (with among others, Alan Kay): http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/ There's a lot of different papers, but the last annual report of STEPS is a good place to start: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf [edit: Sadly, as far as I've been able to figure out, the kscript and ksworld software mentioned in the last few reports, isn't available anywhere. But I did discover a port of squeak to the lively (js) kernel system: https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS ]
In 1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: Closing Panel

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