Bryce,

I do not know why you say that it needs to be faster to be worth while. 
Any improvement on current performance is good.  With enough 
performance people can relax a bit more and use Squeak the way it was 
envisioned.  When Java crossed some critical performance threshold it 
took off, because it got taken seriously.  Squeak is still waiting to 
be taken seriously.  Yes, it is used in many research contexts, but not 
much elsewhere by anyone that is not a die-hard Smalltalk fan.  There 
is very little that things like Ruby offer that are not far better done 
in Smalltalk, but they are out there and we are gathered around the 
fire.  Better performance will help developers feel good about basing 
products on Squeak.

So, I would encourage you to solicit help in porting to people's 
favorite platforms.  That will require some docs/comments to make it 
somewhat understandable.  You do not need to make it too much effort, 
after all you only want help from those that can operate on their own.  
If you can get enough other platforms supported, the community will 
come together on it.  You also need to track the 64 bit image changes.

I would love to help on the ppc port.  If my income source stabilizes I 
will let you know.

Michael




On Dec 17, 2004, at 2:35 PM, Bryce Kampjes wrote:

> stéphane ducasse writes:
>> Have you tried to set up a collect?
>> How much money do you think would help to boost it?
>
> No, I haven't set up a collection. I'm really thinking about what to
> do when my current job ends in the end of September. So we're
> talking a full time income in London.
>
> I still need to figure out what I want to do next but that depends
> a lot on what options are available.
>
> With a year or two full time it should be easy to more than double
> Exupery's current bytecode performance and provide very good send
> performance.  That's enough to be interesting and possibly close
> enough to be fundable.
>
> So for now it's time to think. And fix up the final few problems
> with the new intermediate language.
>
> Bryce
>