In Croquet that simply falls out of synchronizing computation itself, rather than just state. Since all machines receive the exact same inputs, their physics engines arrive at the exact same results without any need to cooperate.
I would like to speed up some parts of SqueakJS using web assembly. For example BitBlt would be a prime target.
For the overall VM, however, I’ll leave that to others (I know Craig Latta has been making progress).
I just love coding and debugging in a dynamic high-level language. The only thing we could potentially gain from WASM is speed, but we would lose a lot in readability, flexibility, and to be honest, fun.
I’d much rather make the SqueakJS JIT produce code that the JavaScript JIT can optimize well. That would potentially give us more speed than even WASM.
Indirectly, as in I worked on both, and they are directly inspired by ideas from Smalltalk. Both Lively Kernel and Croquet were done by members of Alan Kay’s group.
There’s also an Alto mode https://codefrau.github.io/Smalltalk78/?alto which is closer to what folks used to work with back then