Ralph Johnson writes:
 > The point of the thesis is that a lot of proposed hardware features
 > don't help performance very much, and in fact there are software
 > solutions that are more effective.  This is a good point.  However, it
 > doesn't mean that no hardware features can help.  Moreover, it assumes
 > that hardware is expensive and software is cheap, and in fact the
 > opposite is true.  People have been working on a JIT compiler for
 > Squeak for some time, and we aren't using one yet.  It is easy to say
 > "just put it in the compiler", but it might be too complex to ever get
 > the compiler working.

But we've been making continuous progress towards a JIT for the 
last few years. I doubt that finishing Exupery would cost anything
like what a modern high performance CPU costs to design. Exupery has
just started compiling in the background, a few bugs need to be fixed
before that's a safe way to run it. It is progressing.

Writing in Smalltalk is a good way to keep development costs down.

Bryce