VA Smalltalk supports a wide variety of hardware and operating systems. In each case, the implementation emphasizes those capabilities of the platform that are standardized, efficiently implemented, or essential to achieving native look and feel. For example, the native widgets provided by OSF/Motif are used as the underlying implementation of the standard widgets on those platforms supporting OSF/Motif. Similarly, Windows controls are used on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Wherever possible, the required functionality is mapped directly to the equivalent platform capability. Where the specified functionality is not provided by the platform, it is emulated to support portability.