Jecel:

Self inlines several of the recursive calls in benchFib, so
I think the numbers you got are accurate: Self is 40 times
faster on this benchmark. Because of the inlining, it is
probably quite a bit faster than C, as well.

Dave says he found and fixed a couple of Mac-OS related
performance leaks, so anyone interested in Self might want
to get the latest version. Also, an earlier version ran
much better with Mac virtual memory turned on. I don't
know if that's still the case, but it's worth a try.

Interesting that only Squeak was up to computing the geometric
means. But couldn't Self have done it using big nums?

	-- John


>I have run a few simple benchmarks to compare Squeak and Self on a Sparc
>machine. I use a Linux PC for Squeak, so the version I have on the Sparc
>is far from the latest. If that makes much of a difference in these short
>codes, let me know and I'll try again with Squeak 2.6.
>
>I'll list all relevant sources here so people can easily see if I have
>made any mistakes.
>
>-------------------------------
>... code ...
>-------------------------------
>Geometric means:
>
>It is interesting that I wasn't able to calculate these averages in
>Python (integer overflow, even with all values divided by 1000) nor
>in Self (30 bit floating points don't have enough precision), so only
>Squeak was up to the job:
>
>Squeak 2.2 benchFib:    394775
>Self 4.1 benchFib:    12471732
>
>Now this was way too much of a difference, so I checked the results of
>the "26 benchFib" expression and got the same results in both languages.
>Then I looked at the raw computation times in both systems and got values
>of around 1 second in Squeak and about 25 milliseconds in Self, which
>would confirm the first results. But there is probably something I am
>doing wrong here that I am not seeing.
>
>Squeak 2.2 benchmark: 10056298
>Self 4.1 benchmark:   55485842
>
>This is much more like it - a five to one difference in speed is what
>I normally see between Self and Squeak for large applications. Note
>that there are situation in which Squeak actually feels faster, and
>you should never read much into benchmarks (specially ones such as
>these) anyway.
>
>Cheers,
>-- Jecel