An interesting read here is the following:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/travis/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3277556678

Squeak isn't quite as fast if you run the benchmarks (though for largely 
non-GC related reasons) but by and large this should get you a feeling that 
dealing with lots and lots of objects (and cleaning up afterwards) is 
something that these systems (incl. Squeak) have been specifically designed 
for. It is really, REALLY fast.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Rowledge" <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 8:24 PM
Subject: Re: Object turnover.


> Ryan Zerby <tahognome at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Should I worry about having a program that makes a large number of
>> temporary objects?
> Not in the sense of having to worry about the system not being able to
> cope. VM implementors over the ages have done your worrying for you!
>
> However, it is often the case that a little fiddling with algorithms
> can improve things; it's time for you to start using the
> TimeProfileBrowser to see where your time goes. Look it up in the
> browser and start playing.
>
>> planet position: (Point r: rho degree: theta) + self center.
>
>>
>> This creates a lot of points that get discarded on the next iteration
>> of step.
> No great problem; the gc will recycle them almost immediately. The time
> 'wasted' is simply that you might be creating them unneccessarily, say
> if the algorithm can be squeezed a bit.
>
> If you have a large number of planets in mind you might even benefit
> from the sort of low down underhanded cleverness that Yoshiki has
> recently used to do very fast array processing in the cellular automata
> morphs. By putting the coordinates into FloatArrays it is possible to
> get thousands of cells bouncing around; at least on machines with
> floatingpoint hardware like I don't have :-(
>
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> The program is absolutely right; therefore the computer must be wrong.
>