johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu (08/16/89)
While user primitives are the best way at present to make a Smalltalk program fast, they are not the ultimate long-term solution. What is really needed is an optimizing compiler for Smalltalk. My optimizing compiler is not yet usable by people outside our research group, but it makes Smalltalk programs an order of magnitude faster, will compile all the usual Smalltalk programs, works with a modified version of the Smalltalk debugger, and in general should produce an environment that is just like Smalltalk-80 except with programs as fast as those written in C. Programs that have a lot of polymorphism cannot be optimized as much, but a FORTRAN program that has been recoded in Smalltalk and compiled with our compiler should be the same speed as the original program. Ralph Johnson - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign