J J writes:
Any guess when 1.0 will be finished? Are you the only person working on this?
I've been saying about a year, so I'd guess 1.0 by next summer. However that depends on what ends up going into 1.0 and how busy I am over the next year.
I'm the main person working on it. There's been about 5 other contributors so far including Andy and Patrick who did the Windows and Solaris x86 ports.
Also, just to make sure I understand: I came from a C++ background, and when I hear "inlining" I think of C++ inline (when ever you see this "function" replace it, at the call site, with the body of the "function"). I assume you mean the same thing in smalltalk? It does look like smalltalk could make some huge gains from such inlining since so much of the code just calls other methods with slightly different arguments.
Inlining means the same thing except driven automatically by profiling rather than an "inline" keyword. In this case read the work done by Urs Holzle for Self to get a feeling for the specifics.
Exupery will also dynamically decompile when nessisary. This is to allow seemless debugging and meta-programming. Exupery already dynamically decompiles methods when it clears it's code cache or on image saves.
Inlining is planned as the 2.0 feature. Yes, it's important, keeping it out of 1.0 is a way to reduce scope creep in 1.0.
Bryce