Best multimethods/multiple dispatch implementations?

I have been looking a bit at multiple dispatch.


So far I found info about the Cecil/Vortex project (http://
www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/Papers/dispatching.html),
a bit about MultiJava (http://multijava.sourceforge.net/pubs.shtml), a
paper about multi-methods for C++ (http://www.research.att.com/~bs/
multimethods.pdf) and something about compressed multi-method
dispatch tables (http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00073721/en/)


I know Dylan and CLOS also has implementations, but I heard CLOS'
might be pretty slow.


So, two questions:


1. What is state-of-art when it comes to multiple dispatch? From what
I read so far it sounds that something like Self's PICs could also
speed up multiple dispatch. Are there any implementations using
something like that?


2. Is it feasible to base an OO-language on multiple dispatch (I was
thinking left-to-right to resolve ambiguous calls like CLOS) so that
someObject.someMethod() becomes syntactic sugar for the function
someMethod(someObject). This is how a lot of dynamically typed OO
already are built, but without single dispatch on the remaining
arguments, which allows for some simplifications (and more efficient
dispatch?)




/Christoffer

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