I just did some tinyBenchmarks on the latest Mac VMs (attached below). It appears that bytecode speed is higher for Ian's VM, but went down a tad from 3.6 to 3.7. More importantly though, send speed is higher in John's VMs, and even though it went up in Ian's latest it still is not at the level of John's.

In both cases it's a 10-15% difference, which is not that important, but still significant ...

- Bert -

This is an iMac G5 1.6 GHz, using the precompiled VMs

Ian 3.6-3 '127744510 bytecodes/sec; 4655980 sends/sec' '128837443 bytecodes/sec; 4665225 sends/sec' '130545639 bytecodes/sec; 4662139 sends/sec' '130346232 bytecodes/sec; 4550777 sends/sec' '129685916 bytecodes/sec; 4527395 sends/sec'

Ian 3.7-7 '112974404 bytecodes/sec; 4788828 sends/sec' '113374667 bytecodes/sec; 4811709 sends/sec' '111111111 bytecodes/sec; 4785577 sends/sec' '113174182 bytecodes/sec; 4898648 sends/sec' '113174182 bytecodes/sec; 4746905 sends/sec'

John 3.7.5Beta3 '108658743 bytecodes/sec; 5141615 sends/sec' '108566581 bytecodes/sec; 5156660 sends/sec' '106224066 bytecodes/sec; 5252723 sends/sec' '105960264 bytecodes/sec; 5141615 sends/sec' '105090311 bytecodes/sec; 5175591 sends/sec'

John 3.8.7Beta1 '108291032 bytecodes/sec; 5256640 sends/sec' '111401218 bytecodes/sec; 5115497 sends/sec' '111401218 bytecodes/sec; 5300116 sends/sec' '107292539 bytecodes/sec; 5002948 sends/sec' '107925801 bytecodes/sec; 5344317 sends/sec'