SLslim·Jan 1, 2023
it's based on this
https://github.com/dbanay/Smalltalk
(there's one screenshot there)
In Smalltalk-80 on Raspberry Pi: A bare metal implementationdbanay
Smalltalk
C2020–2023
dbanay / Smalltalk
Smalltalk
By the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80
7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
910GitHub stars
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By the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80
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Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Observed mentions: 2020-05-25 18:41:20 UTC to 2023-01-01 18:22:24 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesAuthor here, feel free to ask any questions you have :).
It's amazing this little project shows up again here. So far, I received a lot of very positive and friendly feedback about this little pet project of mine.
The whole project would not have been possible without the work of Rene Stange, who created the circle bare-metal library for the Raspberry Pi (https://github.com/rsta2) and Dan Banay, who created a C++ implementation of the Smalltalk-80 VM (https://github.com/dbanay/Smalltalk). I mostly hacked together some glue code...
If you want to dig deeper, the Blue Book by Adele Goldberg and David Robson (scan provided by Stephane Ducasse, thanks a lot!) is _the_ reference on both the language and the structure and implementation of the underlying bytecode VM: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
Beware, though
Read the rest
it's fully functional, crosstalk is still limited by constraints of the original Smalltalk 80 system - e.g. in terms of color (black and white only), possible screen resolution (2^20 pixels, the system crashes if you try to increase the resolution beyond this) and available memory (~1 MB!).
Nevertheless, I think it's a rather authentic reproduction of a more than 40 year old system and I learned (in a comment thread on a completely different topic) that one of our fellow hackernews regulars used it to teach his kid Smalltalk programming - love it! I haven't tried to optimize it significantly, so there's no JIT compiler or bitblit acceleration using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
There's a more modern bare-metal Smalltalk implementation based on Squeak (https://squeak.org) for the Raspberry Pi by Pablo Marx, though this seems to have some stability problems according to the author: https://github.com/pablomarx/RaspberrySqueak
Finally, if you are interested in alternative bare-metal language/OS environments for the Raspberry Pi, you could also give Lukas Hartmann's (of MNT Reform notebook fame) Interim OS a try: http://interim-os.com
I second that. Smalltalk-80 classes source code is an excellent reference to learning pure OOP style.
https://github.com/dbanay/Smalltalk/blob/master/files/Smallt...
In Ask HN: What's the best source code you've read?Bluebook Implementation of Smalltalk-80
6 points · Open discussionBy the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80
176 points · Open discussionBy the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80
33 points · Open discussionDbanay/Smalltalk – “by the blue book” C++ implementation of Smalltalk-80
27 points · Open discussion