What should be in the next release.

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

Bryce Kampjes wrote:
> The big question is whether to work on blocks next.

Yes please! I'm looking forward to throwing away the compiler hacks that
inline ifTrue:ifFalse: and friends.

> It will also make the Exupery shutdown code more
> important because an unmodified VM will not understand these new
> context objects and require image support code to deal with compiled
> contexts (say for debugging).

That's very interesting. Are you going to pursue a Self-style
revert-to-simpler-representations-on-demand strategy?

> The top four items are:
>  * blocks
>  * super sends
>  * new
>  * integration (making primitive inlining usable and the 
> 	        the profiling compiler effective)

What's different about super sends as compared to regular sends? Isn't
the statically-available information better for super sends, and
otherwise they're more-or-less the same? (What am I missing? I should
perhaps have my morning coffee.)

I'd vote for blocks, new, integration, super-sends to be the order.

Cheers,
  Tony
-- 
 [][][] Tony Garnock-Jones     | Mob: +44 (0)7905 974 211
   [][] LShift Ltd             | Tel: +44 (0)20 7729 7060
 []  [] http://www.lshift.net/ | Email: tonyg at lshift.net