Factor/To do/Performance

• can be faster; if base is a multiple of a power of two, factor out the power of 2 and use a shift, and use binary-reduce to multiple together the rest
• <range> is slow; / 1 + 0 max >integer no good
• we can use memsetpattern to initialize strings, arrays on OS X 10.5; actually it will be better to use SSE2 and AltiVec directly instead, more portable... Prunedtree says "can't you write your own optimized memset with intrinsics ? It's not much code and it would be more portable. I can provide the x86 code if you want"
• if gc check is a tail call, we don't need stack frame
• case with words has [ t ] [ f ] if awkwardness
• linear search of recursive-state
• make M: word hashcode foldable

Fixed:

• dispatch: small dispatch over hi-tag doesn't need to 8 fixnum-fast
• make sure that 0 slot in dispatch is the known-tag case