Funding (was re: JIT)

Michael Latta lattam at mac.com
Sun Dec 19 18:09:33 UTC 2004


For numerical applications Java has gotten quite fast, as stated below. 
  But for some applications Squeak is already faster.  Eclipse is pretty 
slow in many aspects: startup, looking for senders/implementers, etc.  
Squeak loads quite fast, and has no problems with locating references 
to messages.  There are some real benefits to having everything in one 
image file, rather than having to load the contents of 1000s of .class 
files!  The only place I have noticed Squeak being slow is in the 
Croquet environment.  3D apps can always use more speed.  But, more 
speed is always better.  There are always applications waiting for more 
speed to be practical.

I looked over Bryce's code.  You are right, it needs comments, and an 
overview.  You said there was some external docs right?  Where would 
those be?

Michael

On Dec 19, 2004, at 9:36 AM, Jochen Riekhof wrote:

>
>> If we could say "We're competing with C not Java for speed" and mean
>> it, that would probably grab mind share. That would take a year or
>> two full time.
>>
> Wouldn't say this any more. We are doing number crunching, image 
> processing and a lot of other stuff with Java, and for the last two 
> years or so (since jdk1.4) we did never come acroos any optimized 
> C/C++ code than was considerably different in speed from the same 
> altgorithm in optimized Java (we  always try to port them due to 
> stability if we can) . Considerable here  means +/- 20% , sometimes 
> Java, sometimes C/C++ is faster.
>
> It would be really cool if Squeak would come even to half speed or so 
> compared to C/Java. I very much like prototyping algorithms in ST due 
> to the great environment, but the speed is really not acceptable for 
> competitive applications today. It is often still faster for me to 
> develop an algorithm  in ST rather than in Java and doing the port due 
> to environment advantage, though..
>
> Ciao
>
> ...Jochen
>




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