> From: "Jon Hylands" <jon at huv.com>
> To: "Joshua Scholar" <jscholar at access4less.net>; "The general-purpose
Squeak developers list" <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 9:03 AM
> Subject: Re: FIX: Making Set/Dictionary etc. loops more robust
>

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 08:30:52 -0800, "Joshua Scholar"
> <jscholar at access4less.net> wrote:
>
>> You know, it occures to me to wonder why common looping constructs near
the
>> bottom of hierachies haven't been turned into primitives.  Faster looping
>> constructs (a SmallInteger to: do:, Float to: by: do:, Interval to: by:
do:,
>> Array do:, ByteArray do: etc.) would significantly speed up some code.
>
> VisualAge has done this. They have a generic collection iterator
primitive,
> with which all the built-in collection enumeration methods are
implemented.
>
> Later,
> Jon
>

It would be fun to add primitives to speed up basic loops, but I'm confused
about if, when and where the new closure compiler is going to come on line.

This might seem weird coming from someone like me who (if you look at my
code) is obviously still learning the Smalltalk programming idioms...  That
atRandom: fix had an extra variable in it and an extra test because I knew
about "whileTrue:" but not about "doWhileTrue:".

Anyway, is the new compiler going to be part of Squeak 4? (the VI4 (virtual
image) page on Swiki hopes so, but the Squeak 4 pages don't say it will.

Is the rest of VI4 going to be in Squeak 4?  Perhaps it's already in - the
page is dated two years ago.  Or was it abandoned?

How do I test the closure compiler?  The page on Swiki says that the
primitives went in to the VM back in 3.6.something, but someone complained
that the new compiler was too slow on 3.7, and wondered if the primitives
are in...

So, are the primitives in 3.7, 3.8 & 3.9?

So I'm not sure how to install the new compiler...  Also, for the sake of
speed testing, I'd like to be running the main classes recompiled with the
new compiler - and I'm not sure what's the right way to rebuild the system
if I did install the new compiler.  I remember reading that EToys break if
you recompile them with the new compiler - not that I'm using EToys.

It makes no sense to me to write looping primitive designed to work on a
block structure that we are going to throw away.  And I do prefer closures
to what Squeak currently has.

Also I'm not conversant on exactly what problems primitives entail - my main
question is what can't I do in a primitive for fear that a garbage
collection will mess it up.

Another point is that some looping constructs might be better inlined than
made into primitives.  I have NO idea how to do that.  Not that this should
stop us from having an interim fix that's better than nothing...

Hey, that's a pretty good argument for making a loop primitive plug in for
the current blocks.  If the old system speeds up considerably because of a
plug-in that will create pressure to make sure the new system has the same
optimizations.