Why is Open Cobalt built on Squeak?
Squeak has a balance of key capabilities that aren’t presently found elsewhere. Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. In order to develop an infrastructure to support a large scale network of interconnected virtual world spaces, we needed to leverage capabilities that could only be provided by a true late bound, message sending language. Open Cobalt’s relationship to Squeak gives it the property of a purely object-oriented system. This allows for significant flexibility in the design and the nature of the protocols and architectures that have been developed for Open Cobalt. An essential part of Open Cobalt’s development process is made possible by Squeak’s ability to keep the system running while testing and especially while making changes. Squeak allows even major changes to be performed incrementally and they take no more than a fraction of a second to effect
