Q: Squeak and scientific applications

Alexander Klein alexander_klein_uni at web.de
Sat Jul 26 10:08:11 UTC 2003


Hello all,

I'm currently looking for a sensible environment to do scientific computing
for my PhD thesis that I hope to start in October.

Once again, I came across Squeak that I had already considered two years
ago before deciding for C++.

Today I feel that C++ was the right decision as far as performance is
concerned, but there are a lot of things that I don't like about C++ and I
think Smalltalk could be a better choice.

The general idea is to use Squeak for visualization purposes and
statistics, while the really hard work is done by an external kernel
written in C or C++.

I spent yesterday messing around with the Squeak environment and I have a
few questions:

1. I was really glad to see that there is a foreign function interface,
since I need to do really severe numbercrunching. Has anyone already used
the FFI to make FFTW (http://www.fftw.org) library calls?

2. I got the impression that Squeak (Or is it Smalltalk in general?) is a
little limited as far as floating point numbers are concerned. Is this
really the case, and if so, what can I do to get the equivalent of doubles
or long doubles?

3. Since I'm used to reading plain text files, I found the system browser
really confusing. Also, although I think I understand the general ideas, I
have a really hard time reading Smalltalk source. Is there anything like
'Smalltalk in two weeks for C++ programmers'?

Best regards,

	Alex




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