David,

> The Strongtalk compiler does not do any special optimization for
> timesRepeat:.  It is able to inline it without a special 
> case, using the general inlining heuristics.  So it should be
> just as fast with timesRepeat2:.  The benchmark is a perfectly
> fair one (for a microbenchmark) for Strongtalk- it is all
> the *other* implementations that are "cheating" :-).

I know and I agree. But Viktor was implicitly claiming that "Dolphin is
a pure interpreter too" and apparently much faster than Squeak. So my
point was about that this microbenchmark is no good for comparing "the
performance" of Squeak and Dolphin since it's measuring quite different
things. (I only brought VW into the arena since I had it handy and
thought it'd be worthwhile to show that little compiler tricks can make
a huge difference when it comes to microbenchmarks).

> So, to make the benchmark really fair, you should disable the special
> handling of timesRepeat: for all the other systems.  This 
> would make the Strongtalk system's time of 45 ms appear
> to be even faster, relatively.

I was about to try this myself but thanks for the info - I suspected
that Strongtalk would be able to do this. And it is Very Cool (tm) ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas