Smalltalk powers forward

There's money in Smalltalk - see The Register's story on the acquisition of OOVM:

Swiss embedded software company Esmertec has acquired the start-up founded by VM pioneer and former technical lead of Sun's HotSpot project, Lars Bak. OOVM was founded in Denmark in 2002 and privately-held Esmertec acquired the company for an undisclosed sum.

The details:

"If you have say, a small router or a dishwasher you can upgrade the code while it's running, no reboot is required," Bak told us today. "If you have a device, and you have more than one component it doesn't make sense to shut down the system."

Consumer electronics manufacturers have experimented with the technology, attracted not only by the serviceability by its small size: as low as 128kb, which includes a TCP/IP stack. For example as a research project, Bang and Olufsen built the VM into digital speakers, which could then be modified over FireWire.

How does it achieve this magic? OOVM's technology comes in two parts, a VM and a development environment, and it uses Smalltalk, rather than modern-day kludges such as Java, which resembles a modern object-orientated environment in the way that a pub ashtray resembles a cigar store.

So much for the notion that Smalltalk is "big and bloated" - For more details, see my article on Lars' talk at StS 2004