[Newbies] What's the speed of Squeak?

[Charles D Hixson]

Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>   Charles,
>
>   Welcome!
>   
Thanks for the reply.
>   
>> 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.
>   
Everybody is slow at string manipulation.  When you're doing string
manipulation C doesn't have much advantage over Python.  It's all in the
algorithm.
>   Simply put, Squeak is usually faster than Ruby and Python, (and all
> of these languages are fast enough for ordinally things.)
>   
OK.  Ruby and Python were the languages that I wanted to avoid because
they were too slow.
>   
>> 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^^;
>   
That's nice to know, but 3x-5x is easily swallowed by a CPU upgrade. 
(Also I've had several bad experiences with closed source systems just
being abandoned, and would like to avoid any repetitions.)
>> 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.
>   
Thanks.  That's what I was hoping to hear.
> -- 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.
And again, thanks.