[Self-interest] future of the Self VM

[Mario Wolczko]

> This anecdote makes me wonder. Since a modern machine is so much
> faster than a Sun Ultra 5, would it make sense to consider a simpler
> implementation strategy for Self, such as a bytecode interpreter?
> Would it be possible to make it fast enough for the UI to be
> responsive, on modern hardware?


Probably. My 37 year old Smalltalk Blue Book VM is plenty interactive.  It’s 18000x faster than when it first ran (and that was measured >5y ago).  But it would be slow when compared to even something like CPython, simply because of the call and closure overhead.