DateTime's and LargeIntegers

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Jun 29 07:03:50 UTC 2004


On Jun 28, 2004, at 10:32 PM, Ross Boylan wrote:

> So does this mean that the crummy performance I've been getting is
> with the assistance of the plugin?

I would think so.  The date/time classes took a real hit in both 
stability and performance in 3.7.  I think the major bugs have been 
fixed, but I'm still seeing anywhere from a 4x to 8x slowdown for 
common operations.  It's not just the new DateAndTime class that's 
affected, but the existing classes like Date as well, because they have 
all been rewritten to use DateAndTime.  Compare the results of this 
line in 3.6 and 3.7:

MessageTally spyOn: [10000 timesRepeat: [Date today < Date today]]

At this point in the release cycle, I pretty much have to grit my teeth 
and bear it, but I think we should reevaluate the design of this code 
for 3.8.  The Duration classes are very nice, but the choice to use 
"nanosecond precision", and thus be constantly dealing with 
LargeIntegers, was IMO a poor one.

Avi




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