Squeak 6.1 'Vanessa' lands after 4 years with 9,000+ method changes

Squeak, the open-source Smalltalk environment nearing its 30th birthday, has shipped version 6.1, codenamed ‘Vanessa.’ It’s the first release in roughly four years and folds in more than 1,700 merged patches touching over 9,000 methods. The headline additions include a rebuilt tree browser for navigating classes and categories via refurbished hierarchical morphs, and the revival of ‘Objectland’ (the 2003-era ‘Worlds of Squeak’), a curated gallery of examples showcasing the system’s live-programming capabilities.

Beneath the UI work sit changes to core kernel infrastructure governing how processes are simulated, unwound, and scheduled, plus improvements to reshaping classes. The bulk of the changelog is developer-experience polish: better inspecting, debugging, profiling, and code-versioning tools; a major Morphic overhaul with improved type-to-filter, recursive find, drag-and-drop, and theming; and broad high-DPI fixes across widgets, games, and Etoys. Notable smaller items include reintroducing the long-retired BlobMorph and fixing a window memory leak.

The release is dedicated to the memory of Vanessa Freudenberg (1972–2025), a longtime contributor and author of SqueakJS, the browser-based VM used to render the notes’ interactive examples. For a niche but historically influential system that shaped modern object-oriented and live-coding ideas, the release signals continued community stewardship rather than dramatic reinvention.