Newspeak (programming language)

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Newspeak is a class-based, message‑driven programming language in the Smalltalk and Self family. Designed by Gilad Bracha and collaborators, it first appeared in 2006 and has a dynamic, optional type system. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and in web browsers, with implementations in C++, Newspeak, and JavaScript under an Apache license. The major implementation is the Primordial Soup VM.

A standout feature of Newspeak is its modularity. There is no global namespace. Top-level classes serve as module declarations, and modules themselves are first-class, stateless values that can be stored, passed, or returned from methods. Dependency injection is built into the language: all class dependencies (slots) must be explicitly referenced, making every class effectively virtual. Names are late-bound and interpreted as message sends, similar to Self.

Direct access to instance variables is not allowed; getters and setters are automatically generated to access them. Classes may be nested, a design choice shared with BETA, but Newspeak’s modular approach remains a key difference from other languages.

Newspeak was developed with substantial work at Cadence Design Systems, which funded the project from 2006 to 2009 and used Newspeak to build much of its own tooling, including an IDE, a GUI library, and core libraries. The name and branding reference Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak—its motto on the site is “It’s doubleplusgood”—and the logo evokes Big Brother’s eye. It is distinct from a different Newspeak language created in 1984 for a separate hardware platform.

The platform includes Primordial Soup, a VM that runs serialized Newspeak snapshots, and an internal object representation inspired by the Dart VM. Newspeak tooling and runtimes can be built on multiple platforms using SCons.