Category:Smalltalk: Difference between revisions

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Some implementations support source-to-source compilation to C, JavaScript or Java. These may or may not show some limitations in the support for dynamic changes at execution time. Typically, the full dynamic bytecode is used for development, followed by a compilation phase for deployment/packaging.

All Smalltalks use and depend on garbage collection for automatic reclamation of unused objects, and most implementations use modern algorithms such as generation scavenging, incremental background ~~mark&sweep~~ and finalization support. Imprecise conservative collectors are typically not used. Reference counting was abandoned in the 70s.

All Smalltalks use and depend on garbage collection for automatic reclamation of unused objects, and most implementations use modern algorithms such as generation scavenging, incremental background collectors, weak references and finalization support. Imprecise conservative collectors are typically not used. Reference counting was abandoned in the 70s.

As message send performance is critical in Smalltalk, highly tuned cache mechanisms have been invented and are used: inline caches, polymorph inline caches, dynamic recompilation based on receiver and/or argument types etc.