Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulkmutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk. Overview Squeak is a modern implementation of Smalltalk-80 that is available for free via the Internet, at

. We have developed and implemented techniques that double the performance of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages. Our SELF implementation runs twice as fast as the fastest Smalltalk implementation, despite SELF's lack of classes and explicit variables. To compensate for the absence of classes, our system uses implementation-level maps to transparently group objects cloned from the same prototype, providing data type information and eliminating the apparent space overhead for prototype-based systems. To compensate for dynamic typing, user-defined control structures, and the lack of explicit variables, our system dynamically compiles multiple versions of a source method, each customized according to its receiver's map. Within each version the type of the receiver is fixed, and thus the compiler can statically bind and inline all messages sent to self. Message splitting and type prediction extract and preserve even more static type information, allowing the compiler to inline ma...

Abstract. We have developed and implemented techniques that double the performance of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages. Our SELF implementation runs twice as fast as the fastest Smalltalk implementation, despite SELF’s lack of classes and explicit variables. To compensate for the absence of classes, our system uses implementation-level maps to transparently group objects cloned from the same prototype, providing data type information and eliminating the apparent space overhead for prototype-based systems. To compensate for dynamic typing, user-defined control structures, and the lack of explicit variables, our system dynamically compiles multiple versions of a source method, each customized according to its receiver’s map. Within each version the type of the receiver is fixed, and thus the compiler can statically bind and inline all messages sent to self. Message splitting and type prediction extract and preserve even more static type information, allowing the compiler to inline many other messages. Inlining dramatically improves performance and eliminates the need to hard-wire low-level methods such as +, ==, and ifTrue:. Despite inlining and other optimizations, our system still supports interactive programming environments. The system traverses internal dependency lists to invalidate all compiled methods

In this dissertation, we show how a relatively simple and extremely fast interprocedural optimization algorithm can be used to optimize many of the expensive features of statically typed, object-oriented languages --- in particular, C++ and Java. We present a new program analysis algorithm, Rapid Type Analysis, and show that it is fast both in theory and in practice, and significantly out-performs other "fast" algorithms for virtual function call resolution. We present optimization algorithms for the resolution of virtual function calls, conversion of virtual inheritance to direct inheritance, elimination of dynamic casts and dynamic type checks, and removal of object synchronization. These algorithms are all presented within a common framework that allows them to be driven by the information collected by Rapid Type Analysis, or by some other type analysis algorithm. Collectively, the optimizations in this dissertation free the programmer from having to sacrifice modularity and extensibility for performance. Instead, the programmer can freely make use of the most powerful features of object-oriented programming, since the optimizer will remove unnecessary extensibility from the program.

This paper is an attempt to trim some of the rough performance edges from the CLOS language, and to show how such languages can be more efficiently compiled.

Type systems for object-oriented programming languages have been studied a great deal over the past few years. Since Smalltalk was one of the earliest object-oriented languages, it is not surprising that there have been several attempts to provide a type system for it. Unfortunately, none of the attempts have been completely successful. In particular, none of the proposed type systems are both type-safe and capable of type-checking most common Smalltalk programs. Smalltalk violates many of the assumptions on which most object-oriented type systems are based, and a successful type system for Smalltalk is necessarily different from those for other languages. We have designed a new type system for Smalltalk. The biggest difference between our type system and others is that most type systems for object-oriented programming languages equate classes with types and subclassing with subtyping. In our type system, types are based on classes (i.e. each class defines a type or a family of types)...

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulkmutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk. Overview Squeak is a modern implementation of Smalltalk-80 that is available for free via the Internet, at