At Sat, 6 Sep 2008 08:29:35 -0700, David Finlayson wrote:
The next generation of workstations we buy will probably have dozens of cores but hard drives and memory will only be marginally faster (if history is any indication). So, if I/O is the rate limiting factor, not cpu speed, why not look for the most productive programing environment possible? I've always read that Smalltalk is often considered the most productive programing environment ever invented. So I wanted to give it a try. But I am discovering (from the point of view of a scientist programmer like myself) it lacks a lot in comparison to Matlab or Python (both high-level) and especially C and C++ (lots and lots of library code).
That observation on the sophistication level is quite right. And, Squeak's moving/compacting GC would give you some more penalty compared to other implementations when it involves 10's of MB to GB of data.
I am going to have to weigh the pros and cons of whether it makes since to push on with this.
We tend to do something just ok for its own need, but listening to the other people's needs is always fun (and depressing^^).
-- Yoshiki