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Thanks. Just found this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/217838.217844 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/217838.217844. Very interesting. Why didn't D

• wrs 2y ago
  The MessagePad hardware was pretty limited. There was 128kB of RAM, of which NewtonScript got to use about half. But there was 4MB of ROM. So the ability to leave objects in ROM was very important. Most (all?) other languages including Dylan and Smalltalk assume objects all reside in RAM and are mutable. The prototype inheritance system is what made this work, as described in that paper. NS used a simple bytecode interpreter, except toward the end where we had an AOT native compiler you could apply to individual functions (native functions were much larger than bytecode so you had to be selective). Later hardware had more RAM (up to 4MB in the MP2000) and we might have been able to try some kind of JIT compilation, if the product had survived longer.