Traditionally, GNU Smalltalk had a major release about every year. When a major release is made, development is branched and new stable releases are made as necessary (approximately every two months) until the next major release is ready.

Current release

The current stable release is GNU Smalltalk 3.1, released October 19th 2008. Compared to the 3.0.x branch, the 3.1 release focuses on porting libraries from other Smalltalks, adding bindings to other external libraries, and facilitating the creation of C/Smalltalk interfaces. In particular, the following libraries were ported:

• Swazoo
• Seaside
• ROE
• Magritte
• Cairo
• LibSDL

Other features of GNU Smalltalk 3.1 include IPv6 support, improved FFI, a new filesystem interface, and remotely controllable virtual machine instances.

Next release

The next release will include a new browser contributed by Gwenael Casaccio, support for Iliad, a profiler, a Windows port (finally) and many bugfixes. If you want to contribute other changes, write to the GNU Smalltalk mailing list. There are good chances that they will be accepted if they are not too intrusive; for example, bindings to more external libraries would be welcome.

Past releases

3.0.x (January 2008)

New syntax for simpler scripting, continuations and generators, DBI, .star packages.

2.3.x (December 2006)

Unicode support, improved regular expressions support, NCurses bindings, improved package manager and testsuite, continuations.

2.2.x (November 2005)

Rewritten bytecode interpreter, shared library support, Glorp goodie, pragmas, sandboxing infrastructure.

2.1.x (April 2003)

Ephemerons (finalization), generational/incremental GC, improved package system, embryonic debugger, MySQL goodie, new parser based on the Refactoring Browser, XML/SAX 2.0 goodie, GTK+ bindings.

2.0.x (June 2002)

Just-in-time compiler, GMP support, namespaces widely used, backwards-incompatible ANSI compatibility fixes, virtual filesystem layer, NaN/infinity support, NetClients goodie.

1.95.x (October 2001)

malloced objects, ANSI compatibility, exception handling, socket library, SUnit support, web server goodie, non-blocking I/O, regular expression goodie, i18n for Smalltalk programs.

1.8.x (January 2001)

Bug fixes, {...} array constructor syntax.

1.7.x (June 2000)

More block optimization, full LargeInteger support, namespaces.

1.6.x (1999)

Blocks as closures, improved speed, finalization, read-only constants, weak objects, LargeInteger operations, more functionality in the base classes.

1.1.x (1991)

First publicly available version.