[johnlorentzson]

With regards to performance, Craig Chambers's thesis on the Just-In-Time compiler for Self proves pretty definitively that a language as (or more) flexible as Smalltalk can be very performant without losing any dynamic properties. It certainly isn't an easy compiler/runtime to recreate for any given language, but it does exist.

It didn't exist at the time you're referring to however, so in that context the point does stand, mostly. I believe there was some form of flexible compiled optimization for Smalltalk (since Chambers's thesis references it as prior work) but I forget when that was and how commonly used it was.

[uticus]

Chamber's thesis was '92 if i'm looking correctly (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/craig-chambers/th...), Ungar's thesis from '86 greatly predates it: https://archive.org/details/ungar-smalltalk

[rjsw]

The first JIT was for Smalltalk, running on a 68020 system.

[johnlorentzson]

That sounds about right. (Just to clarify, what I was referring to with "did not exist at the time" was specifically Self's JIT and its new techniques.)