Ron Teitelbaum writes:

 > Most of the work we do in the cryptography team is on small byteArrays so it
 > would be very important that we do not lose speed there from any changes in
 > implementation.

It would be easy to extend Exupery to be able to compile that method
well. It's just SmallInteger arithmetic, ByteArray>>at: (not yet
handled), and species.

I've talked a little to Martin about crypto, handling the byte based
algorithms should be fairly easy. The word based ones will be harder
but still very possible.

The trick to compile word based algorithms efficiently is to avoid
generating objects for intermediate words. It's basically the same
problem as compiling floats without any overhead. But fast full word
compilation is definitely something that would have to wait until
after 1.0 unless someone else would like to work on it.

It would be nice to work with the crypto team after the next release
or two if you like the idea of compiling Smalltalk rather than writing
primitives to provide speed.

Bryce