Dan --

Are you / is anybody doing work on typing a la StrongTalk?  To quote 
from your post awhile ago in the "Animorphic ST (Strongtalk) released!" 
 thread:

 >>  Would the system benefit from being cast into StrongTalk?
  >>  and how much work would this be?

By "would the system benefit" I assume that you meant primarily 
something like what you said in the same post:

 >>  I think type annotations are useful as documentation, and I have 
always felt (and often said) that a Smalltalk with optional types would 
be an ideal computing environment.  It really >>  fills a hole in the 
metasystem.

I know there was a lot of discussion about this question., on that 
thread.  In light of that discussion and further reflection, do you 
think there is a compelling case for  introducing  Squeak-friendly types 
system?  Also, has anybody done the analysis on how much work would have 
to be done?

   >>    Would anyone care if it ran 10 times faster?

OK, I'm an ignoramus.  Let's call the speed gains from typing a la 
StrongTalk, A, and let's call the speed gains from J5, B.

Would J5 and  types together equal a speed improvement of A + B?  

Or does the stuff Ian is doing with J5 involve some kind of magic typing 
behind-the-scenes, so that A + B ~ B?  


Dan Ingalls wrote:

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>Jitter
>One of my goals over the next few months is to continue to encourage Ian to complete J5, the latest incarnation of his dynamic translation technology applied to Squeak.  On the last serious go-round, it helped a lot to have Marcus Denker tracking down bugs, beating compilers into line, etc, and Ian may well need this kind of help with J5.  I'm not the right person, but I would certainly lobby to hook people up at any point where Ian could use help.  I haven't seen anything about it, but I'm assuming Ian will be showing and talking about his work at OOPSLA.  Jitter is a prime example of why I hope we can keep the Croquet and Squeak kernels in sync:  I doubt that Ian wants to maintain more than one version of J5, and I know both Squeak in general and Croquet in particular, could always use an extra 2-5x in performance.
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