The latest virtual machine updates enhance stability and performance across all platforms. Key highlights include refined logic for Unicode primitives, more robust process and thread management, and AArch64-specific optimizations. Additionally, polished 64-bit memory management ensures a more consistent foundation for your applications regardless of the environment.

The breakpoints menu of any class browser now supports adding and removing breakpoints on all 
selected methods at once.

Pragmas defining primitives and typing information, are now parsed as specific AST nodes. Both standard and 
configurable formatters have been
 updated to handle pragma definitions.

In search dialogs, the “matchCase” setting affects results consistently. For case-insensitive search results, matches will be highlighted case-insensitively

We’ve enhanced HiDPI support on Windows by adopting the per-monitor V2 awareness mode. This update brings greater precision to native dialogs and bitmap drawing, ensuring a crisp interface on high-resolution displays. Furthermore, several improvements have been integrated to better handle multi-monitor setups, resulting in a more fluid experience when working across screens with varying scale factors.

Enhancements have been made to the HTTP server connection handling which, under certain setups, could exhibit dropped connections or connections being retried from the server to the client and leading to exhaustion of available HTTP workers.

We integrated the open-source Parasol project for writing automated tests running in a web browser into VAST. Parasol is a wrapper for the popular browser automation tool Selenium.

It allows to write SUnit tests to verify any web application and supports a convenient integration with the Seaside web development framework.

See https://github.com/SeasideSt/Parasol 
for more information.

VAST continues to integrate and improve its integration of the latest version of the Seaside web development framework. 

See https://github.com/SeasideSt/Seaside
for more information.

VAST Platform 15 adds built-in Redis support with a modern Smalltalk API, enabling high-performance caching, messaging, and scalable data access. The client supports async execution, connection pooling, advanced Redis features, and secure SSL/TLS connections for production deployments.

Official ODBC support for Linux has been expanded to include full Unicode capabilities, enabling more robust database connectivity in Linux environments. This update allows VAST Smalltalk applications to exchange multi-byte character data seamlessly using standard ODBC drivers.

Internal updates to database cursor management ensure more consistent resource handling across execution sequences. These refinements address edge cases where system resources might not be fully released following an error, leading to improved memory stability for data-intensive applications.

The SQL parsing engine has been updated to better handle specific statement structures and data types. These enhancements improve how the parser interprets criteria in query clauses, ensuring more consistent behavior when using bound parameters.

The latest updates to Tonel Tools focus on improving the reliability of VAST Smalltalk code when working with file-based repositories. This version introduces stable sorting for file exports and automatic line-ending normalization for Windows and Linux, ensuring consistent repository formatting across different platforms. Additionally, improved change detection during the loading process now prevents the creation of unnecessary editions in ENVY, resulting in a cleaner development history and a more predictable Git workflow.