Why is Croquet built on Squeak?

Croquet required a number of capabilities that could only be provided by a true late bound, message sending language. Croquet's relationship to Squeak gives Croquet the property of a purely object-oriented system. This allows for significant flexibility in the design and the nature of the protocols and architectures that have been developed for Croquet. An essential part of our development process is Squeak's ability to keep the system running while testing and especially while making changes. Squeak allows even major changes to be performed incrementally and they take no more than a fraction of a second to effect. Another key feature of Squeak is its generalized storage allocator and garbage collector that is not only efficient in real-time (so that animations and dynamic media of many kinds can be played while the garbage collector is collecting), but that allows reshaping of objects to be done safely. It may be interesting to note that when we first set out to build Croquet, we ...