In answer to Charles question on what others do to help the startup. Smalltalk is like Ruby in that we always start from source code. In our case there are a few hundred classes and a few thousand methods that would be considered minimal ( we call these the base ) and around a thousand classes and 30000 methods which comprise the Smalltalk libraries. We then add two thousand classes and 40000 methods for our app. As Charles mentioned most of these are never used in a typical session so we need some way to not load them all.
So what we do is precompile all of the base into a simplified byte code which is quick to translate to jvm byte codes. Our loader then simply reads the source files and builds the object structures for the classes and methods. This goes pretty fast. We then do the method translation only when a method is invoked and then cache that result. If the method was not base then it needs to be created from the source. Again this is done on demand. Why not precompile all methods? Well at some point we probably will. But for now it allows more flexibility as we change the implementation. It is slow to compile from source to jvm vs executing the jvm ( almost 30X) but we only do it for used methods and only once so its not so bad. Unless you happen to be looking at the profiler output. regards mark
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