Last year, we discovered a performance bug in Squeak related to poor
LargeInteger hashing.  The following demonstrates the issue:

|s n|
s _ Set new.
n _  3298534883328.  "any big number"
s addAll: (n to: n + 750).
[ s removeAll: s copy ] timeToRun

This code takes less than one second to run with the fix, as it should, but is
very slow on a standard 3.6 image.

Andres Valloud and Stephan Rudlof graciously donated a set of four change sets
that causes Squeak to utilize an *existing primitive* to get a LargeInteger
hash based on, apparently, an expert hashing function (see [ENH] LargeInteger
hash (24 November 2002) in the Squeak fixes archive) but it has apparently not
made it to the standard image yet.  

I have been using this non-stop for months as I have developed Magma.  When I
was using removeKey:, Magma was virtually unusable without this fix.  Since
then, I have hacked Magma a little so as to avoid removeKey almost completely,
since it has performance issues besides the poor hash dispersion. 
Nevertheless,  removeKey is not the problem, it's just a great demonstration of
it.  The problem was poor LargeInteger hash dispersion, which caused lots of
collisions, making deletes (removeKey), adds (at:put:) and reads (at:) all
suffer.  Magma or any program which reasonably needs to put LargeIntegers into
a Set or Dictionary is going to suffer without this fix.

There has been a lot of discussions about the Guides roles lately, but I am
still not sure the what appropriate action I can take to lobby that this fix
become part of the standard image.  I would really like to get this
incorporated so I can get it out of Magma's package.

Guides, I would appreciate any guidance on the next step toward this goal. 
Thank you!

Regards,
  Chris

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