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 a previous post, Instantiations has streamlined our internal processes and adopted new technological approaches because we're not satisfied with the status quo. For us, embracing change is not only essential for creating technical solutions that are modern, extensible, and built to last, but also necessary for moving an organization like Instantiations forward. It's this "change" that has helped us continue making improvements over the past 30 years even while the IT landscape has evolved significantly.
The release of VAST 2022 shows the type of positive change that we're embracing. We're introducing some fantastic technologies to VAST 2022 that will open new doors for customers that adopt them.
The first I'll mention is our advanced Unicode support library. This is where our formal Unicode story begins. VAST predates Unicode, so it gave us the opportunity to make a technological jump over the languages that implemented Unicode during its inception, and instead allowed us to create an implementation that's state-of-the-art by 2022 standards. We created a truly ergonomic Unicode experience that puts users first. Through extensive virtual machine improvements and the inherent memory-safety of Rust, we created a stable implementation that is not only easy-to-use, but highly performant. I’m very pleased with the implementation that Instantiations ended up with, and look forward to continuing this story as we integrate Unicode into other layers of our product. This library truly gives our customers best-in-class internationalization support.
Bringing a brand-new platform on-board is never an easy task, but adding the ARM processor architecture to our supported platforms was an important forward-looking choice. Access to ARM-based VAST systems opens up a whole new class of deployment targets that tend to be more cost effective and energy efficient than Intel/AMD-based ones. From ARM-based cloud services to small IoT devices, VAST on ARM creates some exceptional new opportunities.
We're also continuing our asynchronous programming initiative we started last year. In VAST 2021, we introduced our Futures and Promises framework, and in VAST 2022 we brought in even more abstractions to help manage "Streams" of asynchronous data and group asynchronous tasks into explicit “Zones” that can be managed and customized. These asynchronous streams and zones complement our futures/promises framework, and provide a sustainable way to create and maintain the largest and most complex systems.
Other important features like OpenSSL 3.0, Automated Build Support (ABS), Tonel Tools updates, table widget common controls, and over 200 other enhancements further extend the capabilities of VAST.
In fact, we want everyone to see these new features, so for each major release going forward, we're resetting VAST trial eligibility for everyone. I encourage all of you to go grab a copy and take a look.
Request a trial or Download VAST 2022 if you're already a customer.
When it comes to VAST 2023, we already know that we'll be extending our advanced Unicode support library further into other areas of VAST. Additionally, VAST for Windows on ARM is already almost complete. It's only a matter of time before Windows on ARM becomes ubiquitous, so Instantiations is keen to have this option available for folks when they're ready for it.
When it comes to other future features, we're continuing to see VAST fill the important role of an "orchestration platform", so you will see VAST continue to support the latest communications standards and be an excellent target for backend webservers, cloud-resources, and edge devices. We will continue to push the envelope when we introduce new features, and our customers can feel confident that those solutions will be built for long-term support.
The past few years have been a bit abnormal to say the least, but I hope to finally see all of you in-person at Camp Smalltalk Supreme in Toronto this June. Instantiations will be giving a few talks with topics including our new Unicode support library and asynchronous programming in VAST. I hope to see you there.
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I look forward to hearing your feedback about our latest release, VAST 2022, and stay tuned for announcements about upcoming in-person or online events as well as news about VAST 2023 coming early next year!
