Dorado bytecodes per second

Bryce Kampjes bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk
Fri Apr 29 19:31:35 UTC 2005


Andreas Raab writes:
 > I agree but you're ignoring the fact that todays machines are *fast* and 
 > therefore the price is offset by the relative improvements in hardware 
 > speed, VM technology etc. Nobody would be running Squeak 3.8 on a 66MHz 
 > machine, I'll grant you that, and if our audience would use such 
 > machines we'd have an order of magnitude users less than we do. But even 
 > in schools today, we see *giga* hertz machines :-)

Common sends don't need to be expensive. Inlining based on dynamic
type feedback is mid '90s technology. That would remove the overhead
of writing clean code even on slower hardware. It's on my short list
for Exupery.

My current change, converting #at: and #at:put: to use primitives will
probably result in slower code until inlining is in place. But it
still feels like an optimisation because inlining is such a critical
optimisation.

Yes, machines are fast enough that we don't need to worry for most
code but even when we do there are several ways of
optimising. Sometimes better compilers are nicer than writing ugly
code.

Bryce



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