I decided to run some real benchmarks and find out whether or not I
should be worried about the issue of performance with the SGI VM I built.

Here are the summaries:

VM	Make	CPU		OS		Slop	Smop
2.3	Sun	Ultra-10/300	Solaris	5.6	1.834	1.177
2.3	Sun	Ultra-10/300	Solaris 2.5.1	1.649	1.185
2.3	SGI	O2/200		IRIX 6.3	0.847	0.679
2.2	SGI	O2/200		IRIX 5.3	0.790	0.622
2.2	SGI	O2/200		IRIX 6.3	0.751	0.572

Comparison:
Sun by Ian vs wdc: wdc Slop +11% Smop -1%
SGI by Ian vs wdc: wdc Slop -5% Smop -9%

Bottom line:  

When I build Squeak 2.2 the same way I built 2.3, I got a little less
performance, but less than 10%, so I'm not going to worry about it.

The VM I built using the egcs compiler is a little better at simple
things, but a teeny bit worse at complex things.  But there again,
perhaps not enough to worry about.

-wdc