[squeak-dev] Re: Alien vs. FFI benchmarks (Re: Trying to load ALienOpenGL into 4.1 alpha...)

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Thu Mar 25 16:54:11 UTC 2010


On 3/25/2010 9:48 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>> There's no doubt in my mind. Absolutely nobody is going to spend time
>> optimizing their callout interface manually. They use the stuff that's
>> there. Go look at AlienOpenGL. Go look at Newspeak. That's your answer right
>> there. I have still to see a single example of a (non-contrived) usage of
>> Alien that's faster than the equivalent (non-contrived) FFI call.
>>
> Point taken.
> Yes, you have to be a lot more clever to optimize such calls for your
> use scenarios,
> which, as you said, makes writing an application a lot more tedious process.
> But it is the price we pay, when need something to be heavily optimized, isnt?

True, but in that case, why not go straight to a plugin:

primitiveGlGetError
	<export: true>
	interpreterProxy pop: interpreterProxy methodArgumentCount+1.
	interpreterProxy pushInteger: self glGetError.

That's going to be faster than anything else.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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