Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
Charles,
Welcome!
Thanks for the reply.
I know that with it's heavy graphics front end, it can't be in the upper range (can it?), but how does it compare to, say, python, ruby, scheme, and C?
Of course, you should pick "realistic examples" that matches your possible applications, but if you write a micro-benchmarks that relys on method calls speed and raw arithmetics (like "ack" and "fib"), Squeak is about 10x faster than Ruby and probably 5x faster than Python. Don't take the numbers as is, though.
If it comes to the string manipulation, Squeak doesn't have that much advantage, though.
Everybody is slow at string manipulation. When you're doing string manipulation C doesn't have much advantage over Python. It's all in the algorithm.
Simply put, Squeak is usually faster than Ruby and Python, (and all of these languages are fast enough for ordinally things.)
OK. Ruby and Python were the languages that I wanted to avoid because they were too slow.
Is it fast enough to write a database in? etc.
Sure.
I tried looking on the "computer language shootout", but the only smalltalk they cover is something called GST (Gnu Smalltalk?), which they say is for scripting. Anyway it's too slow for my purposes, but I heard that Squeak was faster...
A Smalltalk system called Visual Works is 3x-5x faster than Squeak^^, by the way^^;
That's nice to know, but 3x-5x is easily swallowed by a CPU upgrade. (Also I've had several bad experiences with closed source systems just being abandoned, and would like to avoid any repetitions.)
I don't need anything as fast as C, but I'd like something faster than Python.
If you compare it with Python, you can count on that Squeak is faster, usually.
Thanks. That's what I was hoping to hear.
-- Yoshiki
A warning to all readers!. The purpose of this email is solely to answer a question on the Squeak "beginners" mailing list. Any consequence you get when you use any portion (especially numbers) of this email to other purpose is strongly discouraged^^; Also, any discussions on the nature of the benchmarks, the versions of the systems, platforms, etc. are discouraged as well.
And again, thanks.