Squeak primitives
Blake
blake at kingdomrpg.com
Thu Aug 11 01:57:10 UTC 2005
On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 06:04:49 -0700, Dominique Dutoit
<dominiqued at versateladsl.be> wrote:
> His argument doesn't make sense. The performance gain resulting by the
> use of primitives instead of objets is marginal, simply because these
> primitives have to be manipulated by calling methods or functions and
> these operations are not cheap. Fast, maybe, but not dramatically faster.
Well, he's working for Microsoft now; he has a lot of apologizing to do
for .NET.<S>
> When I wrote a plugin to access HID devices from Squeak, I made an
> example with code stripped from the previous support for pen tablets.
> This example is interesting because it keeps an history of the pressure
> put on the tip of the pen and does some computation to create a
> calligraphic-like effect, something missing in my previous attempts. And
> while a lot of messages are sent (Collection, Array, Morphic, plugin
> access), it is not slower than the Cocoa version, which is using
> primitives for handling the numbers.
Like my daddy used to say, you never know where the bottlenecks are until
you've tested.
>> 2. Doesn't Smalltalk have primitive strings, ints, bools, etc?
>
> Yes and no. Squeak has primitives for objects requiring heavy
> computation, or more exactly, plugins called by methods wanting a bit
> more punch from the processor. The plugins can be internal or external
> to the VM.
That's what I thought. I knew the "can't use pure objects" thing was
malarkey. I remember getting acceptable (but not great) results from
VisualAge Smalltalk back in '94.
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|