Lambda the Ultimate

Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself by Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, Alan Kay, 1997.

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.

Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk-mutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk.

This paper is so good that it's hard to believe it was written after 1990!