Am 15.07.2005 um 04:36 schrieb Alan Grimes:

> I want to jump on this debate with a healthy MEE TOOO!!!

As usual.

> If Squeak is going to make it bigtime, it's VM has to stop sucking.

Again, not the first time you say that. You should remind me of some  
actual improvements you contributed to the Squeak VM, which might  
give a tiny bit of substance to your rants.

> [... lots snipped ...]
> Ideally, ffi can be overhauled into an efficient means for calling
> external libraries

How in particular do you think we could improve the efficiency of FFI?

> FFI does have its limitations on UNIX, meaning that the VM will  
> have to
> be restarted to upgrade to new versions of libraries.

Last time I checked you could simply unload the library, which will  
get reloaded the next time you issue a function call.

> Another issue, that doesn't have anything to do with squeak, is  
> that the
> default Linux compiler is continuing to get worse at an exponential
> rate. The current stable release (3.4.4 at the time of this writing)
> produces code that's 50% slower than 3.3.4. =(

According to Andreas 2.95 actually produces the fastest x86 code, but  
that might be win32 specific.

- Bert -