Looking at Pharo, it appears to me to be suffering the same bloat issues as Squeak.
Well if you say that it is that you are just looking at the tip of iceberg. This is not for fun that we are massively working on cleaning dependencies and removing wrong code or rewriting it. In the coming months we will work on putting in place our bootstrapping kernel. There are no Smalltalk able to do that right now. Bootstrapping means a lot in term of quality. But we have some work to get there and we are busy with our real work (publishing papers).
I think the problem is that people always look at an artefact as âthis what they wantâ as opposed to âthis is just an imperfect snapshot of steps towards what we wantâ. e.g. Morphic still is a *mess*. We have some things started (e.g. Anthens) that will, when they are finished, allow us to simplify things. But right now they are just duplication. Some of the things are just âscaffoldingâ for better solutions in the future. So Pharo4 is just a snapshot of a tiny increment. Pharo5 will be another. And so on. One thing one needs to see is that only the things that are done are done. This is sometimes to exhausting: even the most trivial, obvious thing needs someone to actually do it. Marcus