I've proposed a project to use Exupery to provide either fast ByteArray or fast 32 bit arithmetic aiming to be useful for cryptology. Is there any crypto people interested in co-mentoring? Most of the mentoring will be on the Exupery side but some help selecting benchmarks and evaluating the results could be very useful.
The idea for 32 bit integers is to provide a proper boxed object that contains a 32 bit integer then write primitives for the required arithmetic. With some work (the project) Exupery should be able to remove the unnecessary boxing between expressions. If the objects were "register" objects that could be assigned to then there is a chance that we could remove all Smalltalk's overhead although a safe guess is would be we'd achieve about 1/2 C's speed.
32 bit integers are a great project because the code delivered could be very simply extended to also work with floating point numbers providing the same level of efficiency. Working with 32 bit integers allows the approach to be proven in a practical setting without also needing to add support for floating point instructions. Less work, but proves the same point and will be easily adaptable to do both.
Bryce P.S. I messed up the exupery address in my first post thus I'm resending to the exupery list.
exupery@lists.squeakfoundation.org