kurt@fluke.UUCP (Kurt Guntheroth) (07/24/84)
<go ahead bug...make my day>
The thing about the smalltalk image from xerox is that it is not a very
imaginative implementation. It is kind of like Wirth's P4 Pascal
implementation; simpleminded, but it works and is well tested. It turns out
that by tuning the implementation you can get substantial speed improvement
out of smalltalk. See the last POPL procedings for 2 articles on doing just
that.
As has been pointed out before, what kills smalltalk on really small
machines is that the whole smalltalk system strains the very limits of a
machine with a 64K segmented architecture. Xerox now seems to consider such
a machine too small to run smalltalk, although early implementations ran on
such a machine.
The smalltalk image is also quite large and access to it in a reasonable
time requires a hard disk. These factors tell you that while you may soon
see smalltalk on a 'personal computer', it is not going to be your garden
variety home system.
--
Kurt Guntheroth
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
{uw-beaver,decvax!microsof,ucbvax!lbl-csam,allegra,ssc-vax}!fluke!kurt