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They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector. However, Pharo people are implementing a new vector engine called Bloc.



Pharo is pretty much the future. I wonder if WebAssembly and it’s upcoming ecosystem will be useful to take some load on a future Smalltalk?

[edit: since I’m getting the posting too fast crap here is another language mentioned in the article KRL by Danny Bobrow and Terry Winograd https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/033e/cd544c4e71b14a7d3ee061... ]


I think about that all the time. Imagine a Smalltalk VM written in WASM. It could load with every site and every site could just be live Smalltalk.


Although it's not WASM, perhaps you will prefer http://squeak.js.org/ , a Squeak VM written in JavaScript.


There's a guy that's written a nice looking Smalltalk in Ruby that works perfectly well in the browser with rails I think.


>They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector.

Most (all?) commercial OSes don't use vectors for their GUIs either.


Android and Windows (UWP) do use quite a lot of vector based graphics.


Yeah, Apple has some APIs for rendering widgets from vectors too, and Gnome (for icons) but most widgets, ui elements and apps are still bitmap based.




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