On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:01:50 -0700, Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu>
wrote:

> Good grief - only twice as fast? That's actually a bit worrying. I'd
> have guessed more in the 5-20 times faster, at least for anything that
> involves running a lot of Smalltalk code. The VW dynamic translation is
> very sophisticated and very highly developed as you'd expect from
> something with around twenty years of work behind it.

Not really, Tim. Back when we were at Interval, we were running Squeak 1.22
or 1.23 or something like that. When I did my 3D stuff there, Squeak was
running about 7x slower that Visual Smalltalk, which had a very fast JIT. I
seem to recall back in '97 that Visual Smalltalk was faster than
VisualWorks.

I have a version of Squeak 1.23, and copying the tinyBenchmark code to it,
on my 1.0 GHz P3 WinXP laptop, I get:

	35,106,966 bytecodes/sec; 1,054,243 sends/sec

On Squeak 3.7 (same machine), I get:

	108,291,032 bytecodes/sec; 3,063,725 sends/sec

Which is roughly 3 times faster. So, Squeak has gotten roughly 3 times
faster in the past 7 years (at least on this trivial benchmark). I don't
know how much faster VisualWorks has gotten, but I'd be surprised if it was
3x...

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com