Originally targeted for the IBM System/360 and System/370 family of computers, it has now been ported to most major microprocessors including the SPARC.
Prior to the development of SPITBOL, SNOBOL4 was thought to be slow, memory-intensive, and impossible to compile due to its dynamic nature.
While delayed binding prevents everything from being determined at compile time, SPITBOL adopts various strategies for making decisions as early as possible.
The instruction set is carefully defined to allow some latitude in its implementation, so that hardware operations favorable to string processing can be exploited.
The complexity of known algorithms for an optimal solution to this problem are high, but efficient heuristics attain near-optimal results.