[Newbies] What's the speed of Squeak?

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Charles,

  Welcome!

> I know that with it's heavy graphics front end, it can't be in the upper
> range (can it?), but how does it compare to, say, python, ruby, scheme,
> and C?

  Of course, you should pick "realistic examples" that matches your
possible applications, but if you write a micro-benchmarks that relys
on method calls speed and raw arithmetics (like "ack" and "fib"),
Squeak is about 10x faster than Ruby and probably 5x faster than
Python.  Don't take the numbers as is, though.

  If it comes to the string manipulation, Squeak doesn't have that
much advantage, though.

  Simply put, Squeak is usually faster than Ruby and Python, (and all
of these languages are fast enough for ordinally things.)

> Is it fast enough to write a database in?  etc.

  Sure.

> I tried looking on the "computer language shootout", but the only
> smalltalk they cover is something called GST (Gnu Smalltalk?), which
> they say is for scripting.  Anyway it's too slow for my purposes, but I
> heard that Squeak was faster...

  A Smalltalk system called Visual Works is 3x-5x faster than
Squeak^^, by the way^^;

> I don't need anything as fast as C, but I'd like something faster than
> Python.

  If you compare it with Python, you can count on that Squeak is
faster, usually.

-- Yoshiki

  A warning to all readers!.  The purpose of this email is solely to
answer a question on the Squeak "beginners" mailing list.  Any
consequence you get when you use any portion (especially numbers) of
this email to other purpose is strongly discouraged^^; Also, any
discussions on the nature of the benchmarks, the versions of the
systems, platforms, etc. are discouraged as well.