After many many hours of looking at evil intel code and various internet source we discovered that Mac Solo CPUs are quite sensitive to instruction alignment issues.
By tweaking the compiler a little, ignoring the obsolete gnu register overrides, plus providing march and tune commands more fitting to the Solo this results in a VM that is 20% faster for bytecodes and 15% faster for Sends than the earlier shipped 3.8.11b2U version.
Beyond that there are also some minor changes:
a) Use PageSize boundary for allocating start of Object memory heap (likely never used). b) Alter getSystemAttributes: 0 to return the full path to the executable, versus the path to the application.
Look for the zip file
Squeak 3.8.11beta3U.app.zip
in the usual places via the link http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/squeak.html
PS we wait for the Intel compiler which has always promised much better compiled code, likely it seems this summer.
-- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com 1-800-477-2659 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===
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