A Third-Generation SELF Implementation: Reconsiling Responsiveness with Performance

Abstract

Programming systems should be both responsive (to support rapid development) and efficient (to complete computations quickly). Pure object-oriented languages are harder to implement efficiently since they need optimization to achieve good performance. Unfortunately, optimization conflicts with interactive responsiveness because it tends to produce long compilation pauses, leading to unresponsive programming environments. Therefore, to achieve good responsiveness, existing exploratory programming environments such as the Smalltalk-80 environment rely on interpretation or non-optimizing dynamic compilation. But such systems pay a price for their interactiveness, since they may execute programs several times slower than an optimizing system.