Smalltalk has been used in quite successfully in engineering and
mathematically intensive applications. Texas Instruments , AMD , GIS
applications and others. The key is that after having designed the system
one must isolate the computational intensive "primitives" and port these to
C. Most Smalltalk's have mechanism for interfacing with C. VisualWorks 3.0
allows one to spawn native C threads and has the capabilities of using
asynchronous callbacks to Smalltalk. Smalltalk MT is a multi-threaded
Smalltalk. BTW - a VisualWorks interface to OpenGL has been built and is
being used in LearningWorks. Parallelism could be achieved via cooperating
images.

Of course with Squeak you can burn the primitive right into the image by
writing Smalltalk code and then using the Smalltalk to C translator
functionality.

The combination of Smalltalk  and external calls to native code is a very
viable alternative to writing an application entirely in C or Fortran.

I have no examples of "massive parallel processing", perhaps some of the
more experienced Smalltalkers on this list can help.

Charles
OCIT

Smalltalk and ext-----Original Message-----
From: Aik-Siong Koh <akoh at adams.com>
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Monday, December 07, 1998 5:18 PM
Subject: parallel processing smalltalk


>I use smalltalk in an engineering software for motion simulation. Smalltalk
>has been excellent for my programming productivity, but now I am looking
>for computational speed. Are there examples of smalltalk taking advantage
>of massively parallel processing? I would also be interested in any
>smalltalk plus C, C++, or FORTRAN combination which takes advantage of
>parallel processing.
>
>Any suggestion on how to maintain the programming productivity of smalltalk
>and yet achieve the computational speeds expected of engineering/scientific
>software is greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks
>Aik-Siong Koh
>