Agree,
My point was to ensure there was no speedup, so it's only a space optimization (1 slot saved from literals, times 5000 senders or so per selector plus maybe a byte for the send bytecode ?).

However the arithmetic ops, comparisons, bit ops, at: at:put:, == and class special selectors still have some specific speed up, especially in COG, so we cannot get rid of specialSelectors alltogether...

2013/9/4 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr>

On Sep 4, 2013, at 12:08 AM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:

> I note that #class was removed from specialSelectors (nilled entry) so as to not use the VM hack which fetches the class without sending a message.
> Pharo prefers the regular message send.
> But next to that entry, there is #blockCopy: which was formerly used for blue book BlockContext.
> BlockContext was removed from Pharo...
> So that makes two available slots for optimizing most used (sent) messages...
> We might choose some candidates and test on some macro benchmark if ever that really makes a difference.

I am not sure if optimizations on that level make sense���

�� �� �� �� Marcus