1 Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical*

In the past, object-oriented language designers and program-mers have been forced to choose between pure message pass-ing and performance. Last year, our SELF system achieved close to half the speed of optimized C but suffered from impractically long compile times. Two new optimization techniques, deferred compilation of uncommon cases and non-backtracking splitting using path objects, have improved compilation speed by more than an order of magnitude. SELF now compiles about as fast as an optimizing C compiler and runs at over half the speed of optimized C. This new level of performance may make pure object-oriented languages prac-tical.