Self (programming language)

In 2006, Self was still being developed as part of the Klein project, which was a Self virtual machine written fully in Self. The latest version, 2024.1 was released in August 2024. Several just-in-time compilation techniques were pioneered and improved in Self research as they were required to allow a very high-level object-oriented language to perform at up to half the speed of optimized C. Much of the development of Self took place at Sun Microsystems, and the techniques they developed were later deployed for Java's HotSpot virtual machine. At one point a version of Smalltalk was implemented in Self. Because it was able to use the JIT, this also gave extremely good performance. Self was designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith in 1986 while working at Xerox PARC. Their objective was to advance the state of the art in object-oriented programming language research, once Smalltalk-80 was released by the labs and began to be taken seriously by the industry. They moved to Stanford University and continued work on the language, building the first working Self compiler in 1987.