JIT?

Avi Bryant avi.bryant at gmail.com
Sat Dec 18 11:55:05 UTC 2004


On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 22:42:42 -0800, Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com> wrote:

> When Java crossed some critical performance threshold it
> took off, because it got taken seriously.  Squeak is still waiting to
> be taken seriously.  Yes, it is used in many research contexts, but not
> much elsewhere by anyone that is not a die-hard Smalltalk fan.  There
> is very little that things like Ruby offer that are not far better done
> in Smalltalk, but they are out there and we are gathered around the
> fire.

You probably know this, but it seems worth pointing out since the
context implies something else: Ruby is considerably slower than
Squeak is.  Ruby's success, and the degree to which it is taken
seriously, has nothing to do with performance, and everything to do
with a very savvy combination of Smalltalk's core semantics and
libraries with a syntax and environment that's familiar to typical
*nix or Java developers.  It also helps that Ruby's C extension API is
the cleanest and simplest I've seen, which means that wrappers for
many significant C libraries appeared pretty much overnight.

*If* we want to make Squeak much more popular and much more widely
used, there are no doubt lessons (or, heck, syntax and libraries) that
we could take from Ruby.  I'm personally not very convinced this is
the goal we should be pursuing, however...

Avi



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