1. CPU: Principles

The interaction between CPU performance and Objective-C has a history going back to the beginnings of Objective-C in the early 1980s and the first public release of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a dynamic object-oriented language and environment implemented on top of a byte-coded virtual machine with garbage collection and complemented by the first integrated bit-mapped graphical user interface (GUI). It was this environment that Steve Jobs saw during his famous visit to Xerox PARC and decided to popularize with the Lisa and Macintosh computers.

Although it provided amazing capabilities for the time, the Smalltalk environment proved too much for even the emerging workstation-class microprocessors such as the Motorola MC 68000, which ...

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