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From: knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight)
Subject: Re: Smalltalk performance
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Organization: The Object People
References: <DCqvup.n43@UQuebec.CA>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 1995 04:44:25 GMT
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In <DCqvup.n43@UQuebec.CA> Benoit Desrosiers <desrosie> writes:
>My question is: in the publicity for VW, they write that VW can be almost
>as fast as C or C++, then why is it 20 times slower? Is it me who is wrong?
>Did I hit a area where VW is particulary slow (loops with simple arithmetic)?

In a word, yes. Smalltalk bounds checks all array references, and
checks all integer arithmetic for overflow. This adds very
considerable overhead to the kind of tests you seem to be doing. If
you want an effective measure of performance you're better off trying
to do something real (this is, of course, true of benchmarks in
general)

-- 
 Alan Knight                | The Object People
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