Colin Putney wrote:
> I haven't seen Alex's code, but 1000x doesn't sound far fetched. If he's 
> using #instVarNamed: it's more than just sending an accessor. It's a 
> send with a full activation, which does several more full sends to ask 
> the class for the names of its instance variables, iterate over them 
> checking for equality, then call the primitive to fetch the value based 
> on index. Slooow.

Oh. Yes. #instVarNamed: ... oh dear. Yes, I see how this would be a 
1000x slower ;-)

> I'm liking the sound of Tweak's approach here. I imagine it's the kind 
> of thing that Exupery could optimize nicely, so it could perform very 
> well, but it would also be more dynamic than the current offset-based 
> system.

Depends on how well Exupery does adaptive inlining. But if I had the 
choice I'd opt for more send performance before dealing with adaptive 
inlining - with an average of 300 cycles per send there is a lot of room 
for optimizations and optimizing sends in general would help out many 
other areas.

Cheers,
   - Andreas