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I’m not part of a normal Smalltalk system, but most Smalltalks provide a similar feature: that is, support for storing objects in a binary format; there are many advantages in using me instead of #storeOn: and the Smalltalk compiler.
The data is stored in a very compact format, which has the side effect of making loading much faster when compared with compiling the Smalltalk code prepared by #storeOn:. In addition, my instances support circular references between objects, while #storeOn: supports it only if you know of such references at design time and you override #storeOn: to deal with them