How do tagged data structures work in Strongtalk?

I'm wondering how tagged data structures work in strongtalk. Are
objects always 4 byte aligned allowing the low two order bytes to be
used for tagging. If this is the case how to floats and doubles work?
How do you gracefully move from an unboxed double to a boxed double?
Or are doubles always boxed? What about floats?

Is there a primitive array type that allows one to have an array of
doubles? Is there a way to have such an array interact gracefully with
an Object array? e.g. if you put an object in your double array can it
turn into an Object array with boxed doubles? Is this type of
situation helped by having a static type system in strongtalk?

I presume the recent brenchmarking example discussed in relation to
memory allocation was designed to test the precision of strongtalk
arithmetic as well as its performance.

Is there accepted wisdom of the merits of boxed and unboxed primitive
types in smalltalk/strongtalk?

Has anyone looked at LLVM? How relevent is LLVM to the strongtalk
project?

regards,

Richard.


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