Zag-Smalltalk

Smalltalk VM Written in Zig with methods stored as type-annotated ASTs

Methods are re-constituted from the AST for edit windows.

Execution model:

• No Interpreter
• Threaded execution enables stepwise execution for debugging
• Native Continuation-Passing Style execution model for performance
• switching between the models is seamless

Memory structure and some of execution principles loosely modelled on OpenSmalltalk VM

Eventually it will include a JIT compiler

More information in the Documentation - not all completely up to date, but captures the intent.

Papers and Talks can be found here

The Zag runtime is written in Zig and this is the auto-generated documentation (needs to be commented/structured better, but it will help you navigate the codebase).

(Previously called AST-Smalltalk, but since the implementation is in Zig, a rename seemed obvious.)

The compiler is written in Smalltalk and currently hosted on Pharo

This includes a compiler to convert an application sitting in the image into a set of classes ready to load into Zag, with all the methods expressed as ASTs.

It is work-in-progress to export to a Zag image ready to be run with the Zag runtime mentioned above.

Loading into Pharo (known to load with Pharo 13)

very much work-in-progress at the moment

Metacello new
  baseline: 'ZagSmalltalk';
  repository: 'github://Zag-Research/Zag-Smalltalk:main';
  load

Commit logs

Commit logs are visible to the team here