Ron Teitelbaum writes:
Most of the work we do in the cryptography team is on small byteArrays so it would be very important that we do not lose speed there from any changes in implementation.
It would be easy to extend Exupery to be able to compile that method well. It's just SmallInteger arithmetic, ByteArray>>at: (not yet handled), and species.
I've talked a little to Martin about crypto, handling the byte based algorithms should be fairly easy. The word based ones will be harder but still very possible.
The trick to compile word based algorithms efficiently is to avoid generating objects for intermediate words. It's basically the same problem as compiling floats without any overhead. But fast full word compilation is definitely something that would have to wait until after 1.0 unless someone else would like to work on it.
It would be nice to work with the crypto team after the next release or two if you like the idea of compiling Smalltalk rather than writing primitives to provide speed.
Bryce