A quick comment...

This whole thing/discussion/war reminds me of the Squeak mailing list, long ago, in its worst days...  Let's all take a deep breath for a second and put things in perspective : aren't we just talking about 2 (TWO) methods here?  Is this a do-it-now-or-die type of decision?  Can't we leave it as is for now and move onto something else ?  Yes, Pharo aims at being a super-clean environment but there's enough crap still out there that we can surely delay that one (and think about it a little bit more) and clean something else!

I guess that since I'm not a VM expert here, I'd have to rely on Eliot's suggestion and advice and knowledge.  If he says it's a lot of work from a VM-building perspective, he must know what he's talking about.  If he says it's a lot of work, he must mean "it's a lot of work".  If he says it's *really* useful from a VM-building perspective, he must really "it's useful".  He's built enough VMs in the past, he must know what he's talking about.

Let's not allow this to become another "I-know-better-and-more-than-you" type of argument (or ad hominem attack) that flooded the Squeak mailing list a few years ago...

My 2 cents.
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Benoit St-Jean
Yahoo! Messenger: bstjean
A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero.
(Albert Einstein)