tim Rowledge wrote:
> Why would compilation to C be better? You wouldn't gain any performance 
> in any serious application. Consider a moment; to send messages you have 
> to do certain work. If you compiled
> 'foo doThis: 4'
> into C it would have to be something like
> messageSend(foo, 'doThis', 4);
> and the messageSend function would be pretty much exactly what we 
> already have in the VM.

Well... no. It would use the native stack for call-return which is 
significantly faster than what we've got in Squeak today. If you look at 
Ian's latest (Pepsi; a statically compiled dynamic language environment, 
see http://piumarta.com/pepsi/pepsi.html) the difference is very 
noticable (2-5x in speed depending on how you measure).

Cheers,
   - Andreas