> As someone who aspires to see a viable Smalltalk-like runtime self-modifiable introspective debugger at the OS level
That's an interesting pile of keywords you've got there.
I don't know about Smalltalk (I find Squeak, Pharo, etc utterly incomprehensible - I have no idea what to do with them), but for some time I've been fascinated with the idea of a fundamentally mutable and even self-modifying environment. My favorite optimization would be that, in the case of tight loops with tons of if()s and other types of conditional logic, the language could JIT-_rearrange_ the code to nop the if()s and other logic just before the tight loop was entered - or even better, gather up the parts of code that will be executed and dump all of it somewhere contiguous.
C compilers could probably be made to do this too, but that would break things like W^X and also squarely violate lots of expectations as well.
That's an interesting pile of keywords you've got there.
I don't know about Smalltalk (I find Squeak, Pharo, etc utterly incomprehensible - I have no idea what to do with them), but for some time I've been fascinated with the idea of a fundamentally mutable and even self-modifying environment. My favorite optimization would be that, in the case of tight loops with tons of if()s and other types of conditional logic, the language could JIT-_rearrange_ the code to nop the if()s and other logic just before the tight loop was entered - or even better, gather up the parts of code that will be executed and dump all of it somewhere contiguous.
C compilers could probably be made to do this too, but that would break things like W^X and also squarely violate lots of expectations as well.