John, do you have Sophie running on this thing yet?

Aaron Reichow revaaron at bitquabit.com
Sun Jan 21 09:56:51 UTC 2007


Brad,

Newer Squeak is slower on any machine- you just don't notice when the  
machine is sufficiently fast enough. It is dependent on the CPU speed  
of the machine you're using. When you are running a 200-600 MHz ARM  
CPU, which don't have floating points units, you definitely notice  
the difference between the versions of Squeak, feeling a steady  
decline in responsiveness form 2.4 (the smallest version I've an  
image sitting around for) up to 3.9.  Mind you, when I say "newer  
Squeaks are slower" I'm referring to Morphic and how it feels, not  
the result of any benchmark I've run. It is the result of changes-  
both good and bloat- in Morphic, not something completely  
fundamental.  MVC feels identical in any Squeak image I've used on a  
slower machine.

I'm not sure what makes it slower specifically- all I know is that  
there has been a steady march of slowdown for each version of Squeak  
released.  I don't know enough about Morphic and the changes to  
Morphic between each version to tell you why, but I imagine a lot of  
it is various improvements to Morphic over the years.  A lot of these  
changes could probably be refactored and performance improved, but  
since that isn't really my area of interest of expertise I simply use  
an older version of Squeak, like 3.2, a version for which I have no  
problems porting my code forward to newer Squeak releases and  
generally for which I don't have problems getting newer code to run  
with a few tweaks.  Some people assume 3.2 is ancient, but aside some  
visual aspects looking nicer in 3.7-3.9, it is pretty much the same  
Squeak we all know and love. :)

Regards,
Aaron

On Jan 13, 2007, at 12:04 PM, Brad Fuller wrote:

> Aaron Reichow wrote:
>> Brad-
>> The Nokia 800 is sure to be just as great a mobile Squeak platform  
>> as the Nokia 770 is. The N800 doesn't have much different from the  
>> older 770, but it does have a faster CPU - 320 rather than 250  
>> MHz.  While 250 MHz sounds slow for Squeak in Morphic, it works  
>> quite admirably- I've been using Squeak on my 770 for a while, and  
>> while 3.9 is too slow to use, 3.6 is usable and anything older  
>> than that is even better. I've found 3.2 is a great version- it's  
>> Morphic feels faster than the newer versions of Squeak, but the  
>> built-in classes are similar enough to 3.6-3.9's that writing an  
>> app for 3.2 and sharing it to 3.9 users works fine. I've also had  
>> little problem getting most code for 3.7 or 3.9 working on 3.2, at  
>> least for what I'm doing.
>
> That is very sad to hear.
> Why is it that a newer version of Squeak is slower than older  
> versions? Is it only on small systems? What has changed that makes  
> it so much slower?
>
>




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