News from Instantiations

Smalltalks 2026 brought us to Rosario, Argentina, on October 14–16th for three days of Smalltalk, software development, and a substantial conversation about AI. Alongside my colleagues from Instantiations, I had the opportunity to share what we have been building with the  VAST Platform and explore how our work connects with developments across the wider Smalltalk […]

Your existing VAST applications contain years of business logic, integrations, operational knowledge, and proven processes. Extending those applications with AI should not require replacing those systems. In this webinar, the Instantiations team will demonstrate current capabilities and discuss work that’s already underway to help VAST applications participate in AI-driven workflows. What you’ll learn This webinar […]

More Paths Forward with AI For decades, enterprise modernization has often followed a familiar pattern: move an application from an older technology stack to a newer one. The reasoning was understandable. Experienced developers were becoming harder to find. New capabilities were emerging elsewhere. Remaining on the existing platform appeared to create greater long-term risk. Eventually, […]

By Seth Berman, Mariano Martinez Peck, Johan Brichau, and Esteban Maringolo Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of nearly every software development conversation. Today's development tools promise AI-powered coding, automated software generation, and dramatically faster development. Those are worthwhile advancements, but they weren't the problem we set out to solve. At Instantiations, we asked a […]

Most conversations about AI begin with productivity. How many hours can it save?How many people can it replace?How much faster can software be written? Those are interesting questions. They just aren't the most important ones. The more important question is this: How do you adopt AI in a way that increases human capability without allowing […]

When an important software system starts to struggle, the explanation usually comes fast. The code is too old. The architecture is outdated. The platform is legacy. The language is obsolete. But after two decades working with enterprise software, I have learned to be careful with that diagnosis. Old technology is visible. It has a name, […]

Greetings from your friendly Chief Information Security Officer! When I joined Instantiations’ compliance journey three years ago, I was impressed with the extant maturity of operations and controls posture. As the compliance landscape continues to evolve in all the ways and domains of business that embrace technology, we made the decision to pursue SOC 2®. […]

Instantiations is proud to announce that we have joined the American Bankers Association (ABA) Partner Network. At Instantiations, we help financial institutions modernize and support mission-critical systems through custom engineering, platform expertise, and innovative technology solutions that improve operational efficiency and long-term reliability. Joining the ABA Partner Network marks an important milestone in our continued […]

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how software is designed, built, and maintained. AI coding assistants are becoming a common part of the developer toolkit. Yet most of these tools are designed around static source code repositories, not the dynamic live environments where many enterprise Smalltalk-based systems actually run. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the […]

Artificial intelligence, automation, and technology shifts are reshaping industries, business models, and daily work. But too often, these changes outpace people and organizations, creating gaps in knowledge, confidence, and safe adoption of these new technologies. At Instantiations, we believe there’s a better way forward. We call it Responsible Evolution® the practice of balancing innovation with […]

Smalltalk is one of the most influential object-oriented languages ever designed. Its simplicity, live environment, and pure object model make it a strong choice for developers who want to deepen their understanding of software design. The VAST Platform is a proven Smalltalk-based development environment that helps organizations build secure, stable, and scalable applications. It combines […]

While many organizations have trusted the VAST Platform for its proven reliability, businesses in highly regulated industries increasingly require more than just dependable software. We’ve seen a clear shift toward the need for comprehensive reports and documentation to demonstrate that both vendors and their software can be trusted. The VAST Compliance Package was developed to […]

At Instantiations, we’re always exploring new ways to better connect with our customers and understand their needs. But honestly, there’s no substitute for face-to-face interactions. This belief, coupled with conversations at last year’s ESUG conference in France, inspired us to host an event in Europe this year. With a significant customer base in Germany (and […]

This past July, Instantiations continued its proud tradition of supporting the Smalltalk community at this year's ESUG Conference in Lille, France! Moreover, Instantiations had a big presence this year: 6 members of the company attended (even members from the new Fintech business line!) and we gave a total of 4 presentations! The conference itself was […]

When we're speaking at various conferences held throughout the year, the topic of us "investing" in VAST comes up frequently. However, we're not only investing to improve the VAST software itself. We're also investing to improve one of the other main differentiators we have: our engineer-backed support. Our software and support are mutually essential to […]

Starting with VAST Platform 2024 (13.0.0), we introduced Unicode support in our Database Management (DBM) libraries. Unicode support works as an opt-in feature that can be enabled or disabled per connection, per database platform, or globally for all connections. Introduction Previously, if you stored text in a database that supported Unicode — by storing strings […]

To say the team at Instantiations has been “busy” lately would be an understatement, but since we’ve recently completed an important transition, I should take a moment to provide an update. In short: Things are going really well at Instantiations. So how did we get here? A year ago, I wrote: “It's clear that the […]

Instantiations has been a proud sponsor of ESUG's conferences for many years, and this year marked the post-pandemic return of Instantiations to ESUG with our attendance in Lyon. This was my first ESUG conference, and I was quite impressed. The location, the presentations, and the interactions with various members of the community were awesome. For […]

With VAST Platform 2023, Instantiations is starting the year with another solid release of VAST. New features, plus enhancements to existing frameworks/tools, have been the hallmark of recent VAST versions, and this latest release is no different. Instantiations itself is continuing to grow as new opportunities have presented themselves in the past year. It's clear […]

As this year concludes, we've been reflecting on the past 300+ days... and it's been a whirlwind. In-person conferences have resumed. New versions of VAST with robust features and new technology continue to be released. And, even more exciting opportunities for VAST are on the horizon. While it was challenging to make enough time for […]

In a low-level programming language like C, it's the developer's responsibility to allocate and free memory by using standard library functions such as malloc() and free(). On the other hand, many high-level languages provide automatic memory management where the language runtime assumes responsibility for reclaiming memory no longer accessible to the program. There are many […]

Instantiations recently attended and presented at the in-person Smalltalk community event: Camp Smalltalk Supreme. This event was held at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) from June 10th through 12th. For those who have never attended Camp Smalltalk, it is a regularly held conference with seminars and workshops about the Smalltalk programming language. This year marked the […]

A little over a year ago, we launched a new website, new branding, and the first iteration of our renamed product line: VAST Platform 2021. For Instantiations, these were just the first of many steps that we took to not only improve our products but also improve ourselves. While we've touched on it before in […]

On March 11, 2022, Instantiations hosted an in-person presentation and tech demo at an event organized by the Internet of Things (IoT) organization, RIoT. RIoT's event, Developer Day 2022, took place at Wake Technical Community College's RTP campus. Developer Day gave Instantiations the opportunity to talk about how the IoT development experience could be better […]

Avoidance of software updates is an industry-wide problem affecting small businesses, large enterprises, and all types of systems. While it might be advantageous to skip some updates occasionally, it's not a good idea to avoid them altogether. We've already written about the importance of updates as it relates to much older software like IBM® VisualAge® […]

Every year before Instantiations does a major release, we make an internal, pre-release build of the VAST Platform available to our customers. This internal pre-release is called our Early Customer Access Program (ECAP). The purpose of ECAP is to provide our users with the opportunity to test new features and provide feedback to our engineering […]

Updating software is important. We all know that better security, more features, and improved stability are generally a good thing. When software is neglected, high profile issues can occur that result in huge problems! Enterprise systems using IBM® VisualAge® Smalltalk are no exception, but we've seen some organizations leave these applications untouched and out-of-date for […]

Instantiations has been working with IoT (Internet Of Things) technology alongside the VAST Platform for a few years at this point. As a result of this research and development, we're improving VAST and finding new technologies to complement it (one of them you'll read about in this post). Outside of R&D, we're sponsors of the […]

Tonel is a text-based file format used to store Smalltalk source code on disk, and was designed from scratch to be version control system (VCS) friendly. It is widely accepted by the Smalltalk community at this point, so Instantiations saw an opportunity to enhance ENVY (the standard VCS in VAST) by adding Tonel support for […]

When VAST Platform 2021 (10.0.0) was released earlier this year, the Seaside version it shipped with was v3.2.0 (from 2016). It was time for an update. For our next release, VAST Platform 2022 (11.0.0), we decided it was a good time to port the latest Seaside version (v3.4.4 as of this post), and to create […]

Earlier this year, F.A.S.T. invited us to speak to their community about what Instantiations is doing from a business, marketing, and technical perspective. The event, Constant Refinement and Continuing Progress at Instantiations, took place on May 20, 2021. F.A.S.T was a great host which led to the event being a success with many attendees and […]

At this point, you've certainly noticed the Instantiations logo, website, and VAST branding are significantly different than before. We're still the same company you've known for years, but we've made these changes to better reflect the current state of our business that's diversifying with expanded services and new technologies. On the surface, it might look like we've made […]