History of LSWVST

When we started our Smalltalk consultancy work back in 1992 for a department of Daimler-Benz Research Institute which used Smalltalk/V for Win32. From the very beginning it was clear that we need to now Smalltalk down to the bits and so LSWVST was created.

We started to write a Virtual-Machine in C.

When it became more & more clear in the mid 90ies that Smalltalk/V will not be developed further we accelerated our Smalltalk work and in 2001 we finished a version which was bytecode and primitive-number compatible with Smalltalk/V.

We developed a new Unicode-based GUI-framework and added a lot of new features to the Virtual-Machine. In parallel we developed LSWDNL a .NET Application with LSWVST.

In 2004 we decided to move our LSWVST-VM away from C and rewrite it entirely in LSWASM, our Assembler. One reason was the removal of the MS Vendor-Lock-In and to be able to provide versions for the Macintosh and Linux.

We finished in 2007 after 3 years of development. We still keep some compatibility to the good old Smalltalk/V but apart from Bytecode compatibility & equal Primitive-Numbers and the feature to start Digitalk-Smalltalk Images with the LSWGVM Virtual-Machine nothing is left. Read about similarities & differences here.

In 2009 we have ported Dolphin 6 to our Virtual-Machine.

In 2011 we started to open our Virtual-Machine for other Bytecode-Sets - we named it the Generic-Virtual-Machine LSWGVM

From 2007 to 2013 we have ported a huge commercial application to LSWGVM, mastering a lot of problems, uncoveringmemory leaks & removing bugs in the Smalltalk framework & also sometimes in LSWGVM.

In 2012 we have advanced with running Haskell on the LSWGVM. Also we have rewritten LSWASM in Smalltalk.

Also we wrote LSW-Runtime Builder which is a tool to create Runtime-Images from Smalltalk.

In 2013-2016 we worked on LSWGVM-X86, LSWGVM-X64 & LSWGVM-ARM .

In 2016 we have ported Dolphin-7 to the latest LSWGVM-X86 .

In 2016 we added the possibility to access 64-Bit from the 32-Bit LSWGVM-X86, which finally evolved into our new main product LSWX6432G .