The Weekly Squeak

The current implementation of CompiledMethods objects is quite complicated. This is due to the fact that this class is one of the most important for the Squeak VM: it holds the information the VM needs to execute a method. This meant that many of the changes that have occured on this class focused on backwards compatibility instead of design simplicity.

Tim Rowledge has recently proposed a new format for CompiledMethods objects which would semplify not only the internals of CompiledMethods, but some other parts of the system too. This modification is based on an older proposal of Tim dating to 1998.

Tim proposal sparked a discussion on Squeak-dev that, albeit a little difficult, is very interesting to read.