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by IronBacon 2620 days ago
Don't know about Smalltalk but there are numerous CL compilers...
2 comments

I'm pretty sure that's exactly their point. People assume that interactive means interpreted, but that doesn't need to be the case.
Ah, my bad, I didn't caught the sarcasm in that post. Yeah, it makes sense now... ^__^;
Smalltalk is compiled to bytecode.
Smalltalk is a family of dialects and implementations. Most of them are indeed compiled to bytecode which is then executed by a JIT VM. Most of them use the "image" concept where you are always in runtime like in a classic Lisp, and yes, the VM handles shape changes etc etc. But some Smalltalks actually have other characteristics, like non JIT or even compiling via C (Smalltalk/X does that I believe).
Which were originally the CPU instructions of Dorado, given its microcoded CPU.

And gave birth to all modern JITs.