There's lots to like about Google's new web browser, Chrome, which was released today.  When I read the awesome comic strip introduction yesterday, however, the thing that stood out most for me was in very small type: the name Lars Bak attached to the V8 JavaScript engine.  I know of Lars from his work on Self, Strongtalk, HotSpot and OOVM, and his involvement in V8 says a lot about the kind of language implementation it will be.  David Griswold has posted some more information on the Strongtalk list:

The V8 development team has multiple members of the original Animorphic team; it is headed by Lars Bak, who was the technical lead for both Strongtalk and the HotSpot Java VM (as well as a huge contributor to the original Self VM).   I think that you will find that V8 has a lot of the creamy goodness of the Strongtalk and Self VMs, with many big architectural improvements

I'll post more on this later, but things are getting interesting...

Update: the V8 code is already available, and builds and runs fine on Mac OS X.  From the design docs, it's pretty clear that this is indeed what I was hoping for: a mainstream, open source dynamic language implementation that learned and applies the lessons from Smalltalk, Self and Strongtalk.  Most telling are that the only two papers cited in that document are titled "An Efficient Implementation of Self" and "An Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System".

The "classes as nodes in a state machine" trick for expando properties is especially neat.

The bad news: V8 is over 100,000 lines of C++.