Bignum performance

[Chris Double]

Bignum performance in Self seems to be quite slow. Executing 1000
factorial on my laptop gives the following:

   [ 1000 factorial ] time
   => 2228

On similar JIT'd languages that support bignums I get subsecond
results. Implementing similar to factorial to use '+' instead of '*' to
ensure that no bignums are created I get:

   [ 1000 foo ] time
   => 0

Where 'foo' is a method on 'traits integer':

   <= 1 ifTrue: 1 False: [ + predecessor foo ]

Has anyone got ideas on what the performance hit might be caused by?

Chris.
-- 
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz