"David Faught" <dave.faught at gmail.com>  wrote...

>Say for example that I want to write a simple physics simulation
>engine in Squeak, maybe based on Orion Elenzil's (Croquet) cloth
>simulation code which is based on Thomas Jakobsen's article "Advanced
>Character Physics".  It would be nice if this code ran rather swiftly,
>so one alternative would be to aim at writing it in Slang the first
>time so that it could easily be compiled into a plugin.
>
>I guess that my first question about this would be "How much slower
>(if any) would the interpreted Slang code run that just straight
>Smalltalk/Squeak code?"  I am assuming that I would be playing with
>the Slang code for a long time before it ever actually gets compiled
>to get the speed benefit, and don't really want everything to be
>terribly slow during this process.
>
>Thanks for any direction you can provide.

Hi, David -

It will, of course depend on what you are doing.  but you can get a good sense of it by comparing how, eg, some of the string search primitives run when you comment out the primitive declaration.  In most cases, it's just as fast as any other Smalltalk; often better because you have things set up for, eg, simple array accesses, etc.

	- Dan