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Life & fun · December 14, 2024

A new Bluebook implementation of the Smalltalk-80 VM

A compiler and IDE for the Luon programming language - a liaison beween Lua and Oberon+ - targeting LuaJIT - Luon/testcases/Smalltalk80 at master · rochus-keller/Luon

A new Bluebook implementation of the Smalltalk-80 VM launched on December 14, 2024 with 11 votes, #1,640 of 5,365 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

In plain words

This project is a new implementation of the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine based on the Bluebook specification. It is designed for developers and researchers interested in Smalltalk programming and language implementation. The implementation provides a reference version of the classic Smalltalk-80 VM, making it relevant for those studying language design, retro computing, or working with Smalltalk systems.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

This is a Smalltalk-80 implementation written in Luon, following the famous Smalltalk "Bluebook" . The original files are in my Smalltalk repository and copied here for convenience. The VM supports an SDL2 and Qt based PAL (platform abstraction layer) which can be selecte bei changing the "PAL2" prefix in _Display.lua to "PAL3" and vice versa. Both a C and Luon based BitBlt are supported (the latter still has issues). This project is meant as a proof-of-concept for the Luon language, compiler and IDE, and to demonstrate the fitness forfrom github.com

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