[Help-smalltalk] GNU Smalltalk status

[Paolo Bonzini]

Hi everybody.  Here is another blurb on recent GNU Smalltalk
changes.

- I have finished the async I/O stuff; I switched the code to use
poll(2) which, I am told, scales better.

- I have simplified the configure stuff a bit and will soon switch
to autoconf 2.50.

- The JIT finally passes the test suite (whoa!) and looks fast:
the full manual is rebuilt in 15 seconds!  I have no recent timings
for the interpreter, but it used to take 60-70 seconds before I
rewrote FileStream.

- I have fixed some bugs when using SortedCollections with
weird sort blocks like [ :a :b | a first <= b first ].  In the process
I did some performance comparisons, and thanks to both the
JIT compiler and the algorithms used by SortedCollection it is
at least 3 times faster than other Smalltalk dialects!

The VM code is now the first part to be frozen for 2.0; the next
alpha will be ready as soon as I finish adding exception handling
to the system classes (instead of using #error: everywhere).

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