Scientific Computing

Maurice Rabb m3rabb at stono.com
Wed Sep 2 17:33:13 UTC 1998


>
>I had the impression that the Smalltalk-to-C translator in Squeak is limited
>in terms of the breadth of possible Smalltalk functions that it can
>translate.  That is, it does a great job of translating the essential Squeak
>VM into C, but was never intended for much more than that.  I thought I
>would have to write extensions in C in order to get that kind of performance
>improvement in any kind of app-specific code.  Can anyone identify what the
>practical limits are to this translation facility?  (I posted the same
>question awhile back, but got no responses).
>
>Thanks,
>
>Kyle Pierce

Right now the ST->C translator seems to be only good for method by method
translation.  It doesn't appear to be straight forward to use on whole
classes because it doesn't handle self at all.  You may have noticed that
methods that have been turned into primitives must pass self as an explicit
parameter.

For example:     bitmap compress: bitmap toByteArray: byteArray.

--Maurice

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  Maurice Rabb    773.281.6003    Stono Technologies, LLC    Chicago, USA





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