[Newbies] Speed

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 14.11.2009, at 23:07, John Worden wrote:

> So are you saying that my example is slow because of the time taken to process the text data files in Squeak? (I was using 3.10)
> 
> Not that it matters in this case but how would I work around this if it were a real application that needed to handle data in this way?
> 
> John

If you do, e.g., 

	FileStream readOnlyFileNamed: myFileName

it creates a MultiByteFileStream nowadays (see #concreteStream). It would be nice if we could just set a no-op converter in a MultiByteFileStream. However, that class has not been optimized for speed yet, even without an expensive converter it is much slower. It reads characters one-by-one instead of block-wise, which obviously isn't speedy exactly, as you noticed.

Instead of the abstract FileStream use the stream class you want explicitly. StandardFileStream is the old class that does no conversion. So you would open your file like this instead:

	StandardFileStream readOnlyFileNamed: myFileName

- Bert -