The design and implementation of distributed Smalltalk

Abstract

Distributed Smalltalk (DS) is an implementation of Smalltalk that allows objects on different machines to send and respond to messages. It also provides some capability for sharing objects among users. The distributed aspects of the system are largely user transparent and preserve the reactive quality of Smalltalk objects. Distributed Smalltalk is currently operational on a network of Sun workstations. The implementation includes an incremental distributed garbage collector and support for remote debugging, access control, and object mobility. This paper concentrates on the important design issues encountered and some of the more interesting implementation details. Performance measurements of the current implementation are included.