Hello,

what are the good things and the bad things in the Squeak VM instruction sets?

I wondered especially if the VM instruction set is "okey-ish" from the security perspective after reading Alan Kays "Early History of Smalltalk" as he admired especially in there the Burrough B5000 mainframe computer and it seems to me that some of its design decisions were introduced into following Smalltalk VM implementations.

Also it seems to me, that there were experiments at Xerox Parc where you sent someone an object for evaluation and received the computation result, which kind of needs a "secure" instruction set. I know that in these times, the security was basically not present. Still I wonder of how the instruction set was considered to be secure as some minimal thought was present it seems to me.

Also what are the performance / memory implications from the instruction sets?

Thanks for your time, Philip