Can you add enhancement issues in the SciSmalltalk issue tracker :
https://github.com/SergeStinckwich/SciSmalltalk/issues
in order to keep them in mind ?

We are trying to create a pure Smalltalk library, so we try to avoid
FFI as much as possible :-)

snip...

--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

I agree with using Smalltalk when we can, and avoid FFI, except maybe one thing...

In Smalltalk, we could completely eliminate the Float primitives and emulate them with Integer arithmetic.

But we don't.

IMO we should adopt same pragmatic approach with basic operations on vectors/matrices, and maybe also for more involved algebra.

The guys of LAPACK decided to use a "primitive" layer BLAS because the FORTRAN compiler was too naive to compete with specially crafted optimizations like that of MKL.
It does not make sense to compete in this area, our language is not taylored for number crunching whatever the JIT efforts we can make,

So let's use some kind of numeric primitives.

That's how Matlab, NumPy, R or evry other interpreter would do it, don't they?

It may be interesting to have some fallback code written in Smalltalk, but it ain't gonna scale.

So don't forget that Smallapack could leverage number crunching, that's what it's made for...