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From: dbuck@superior.carleton.ca (Dave Buck)
Subject: Re: That 15,000:1 speedup: how real? [code included]
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References: <DEDsF1.3I8@cunews.carleton.ca> <42mvrt$13hr@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <42sn4h$a1q@news.iastate.edu> <knight.810917270@tina.mrco.carleton.ca>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 22:11:52 GMT
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In article <knight.810917270@tina.mrco.carleton.ca>,
Alan Knight <knight@mrco.carleton.ca> wrote:
>>I suppose i could have implemented my entire data structure as a global
>>wordarray in smalltalk (though, using gnu, i would have had to write the
>>class,
>
>Aha! You didn't mention that you were using GNU Smalltalk. It's been
>known to have, um, suboptimal performance. In fact this is rather like
>saying how much faster Smalltalk runs than C when I do the C
>benchmarks on a Z-80 by compiling them into Prolog. 
>
>So the factor of 15,000 is actually 1,500, it turns out to be using a
>very slow Smalltalk implementation, and floating-point calculations
>rather than integers. I haven't looked at the code for other possible
>inefficiencies, but this is starting to sound more reasonable.

Absolutely.  GNU Smalltalk is one of the slowest implementations
around.  I don't want to bash GNU - their smalltalk is cheap (i.e.,
free) and it's good for beginners who want to learn the language
without spending thousands of dollars.  But, when it compes to
performance, it's dramatically slower than the other dialects of
Smalltalk and less powerful.

Currently, the general concensus is that Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk
is the fastest followed very closely by VisualWorks.  IBM Smalltalk
(VisualAge) is slower than Digitalk and VisualWorks but still
respectable.  I don't know were Visual Agents fits into this picture,
so someone with experience with VisualAgents can fill me in on the
details.  I consider GNU Smalltalk to be unacceptably slow for most
applications I'm interested in working on.  I wouldn't consider it to
be representative of Smalltalk in general.  The same applies to Little
Smalltalk from Timothy Budd.  It's a very nice version to learn about
Smalltalk and to see how a Smalltalk system works, but it's slow and
isn't representative of the speed of the other dialects.

David Buck
dbuck@ccs.carleton.ca
_________________________________
| David K. Buck                 |
| dbuck@ccs.carleton.ca         |
| The Object People             |
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