Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: ug940002@omega.scs.carleton.ca (Alex Fitzpatrick)
Subject: Re: Smalltalk Beats C for Speed! (fwd)
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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 14:37:41 GMT
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Smalltalker (rayhorn@mercury.interpath.net) wrote:
: Even when I do what you've suggested the C run-time is still ONLY 30% of 
: the fastest Smalltalk run-time and I had to expend far more effort to 
: achieve this 30% using a far less reliable set of C code when I was done. 
: (The Smalltalk garbage collector is far more optimal than 
: hand-manipulations of memory using C.) My main point being that it took 
: me perhaps 2 minutes to write the Smalltalk code and several hours to 
: write the C code. I could have refined my Smalltalk model several times 
: over in the time it would have taken even the most skilled C coder to 
: build the first working model of the C coded solution. Therefore 
: Smalltalk represents a better trade-off for coding abstract solutions 
: (the only ones worth spending time on BTW) than C and Smalltalk is far 
: easier to manipulate and provides very good performance for the time 
: expended writing with it.

While it is comforting to those of us who have made some commitment to
smalltalk, most of the people who read this group don't need converting.

Smalltalk obviously has some real advantages to it, what other reason
could there be for its EXISTANCE as a modern GUI hosted language.

The real problem at the moment is overhead, not speed.  If you have enough 
RAM and a real processor (and a 32 bit image, which I could go for)
the real advantages of a language like smalltalk is painfully clear.


: Cheers,
: Ray Horn, President/CEO, Hierarchical Applications Limited (HAL)

*sigh* 
This is not a flame, but mostly a cry of frustration! Try running a
Smalltalk V/Win 2.0 (16 bit) ) on a 486 with 4MB of RAM.
THEN tell me how bloody fast it is! Believe me it makes a tight
little C or C++ prog. look really inviting.

Smalltalk is a language for the future, when 32 OS and 16+ MB becomes 
as common as Dos/Windows is now.

This is why industry is eating it up and software vendors are ignoring
it !

keep on Smalltalk'n...

Alex Fitzpatrick
Carleton University, Ottawa
ug940002@omega.scs.carleton.ca




