Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system

otherwise. Squeak was never intended as a high performance Smalltalk implementation, it had different goals. When Squeak was created, an automatically generated bytecode VM was already tons faster than the fastest high-performance Smalltalk computers the creators had worked with at PARC, in particular the Dorado. This was considered more than fast enough for what they were trying to do, in particular because the bulk multi-media processing would be done by plugins (also often generated). Making a JIT for better performance was a non-goal. So using Squeak (and later OpenSmalltalk) as a comparison is just completely invalid. The Cog VM was started around 15 years after that, by a Smalltalk VM engineer who had already worked on jitted VMs professionally. http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/microbio/ And so using the Cog VM as some sort of benchmark as the "first fast" Smalltalk implementation is completely unrelated to reality.

David Ungar. It was supposed to be a simpler and purer Smalltalk even if that made practical implementations impossible. But with David Ungar becoming a professor at Stanford, he found students that helped him make it possible, and eventually even much faster than existing Smalltalks. Craig Chambers worked on type inference for Self 1 and 2 and then Urs Hölzle worked on adaptive compilation with type feedback for Self 3 and 4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191080.191116 "A third-generation SELF implementation: reconciling responsiveness with performance" by Urs Hölzle and David Ungar in OOPSLA '94: Proceedings of the ninth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, language, and applications, October 1994, Pages 229–243 This is the technology that became "Hot Spot" for Java. But very few virtual machines have this level of sophistication.