Which Smalltalk to use for production ?

Brian Tabone brian.tabone at gmail.com
Sun Oct 24 17:01:36 UTC 2004


Not to start a flame war, but I ported a non commercial app that did
quite a bit of float comparing and file I/O. I ported it from Squeak
to Visual Works. Visual Works was roughly twice as fast in execution
on the same platform. I believe this is because Cincom has focused on
speed through the use of a Just in Time compiler. Squeak is 100%
interpreted unless you put your heavy lifting into a primitive writtin
in either SLang or C.

Visual Works also supports multiple system windows instead of just
using one operating system window for everything. This can be a real
advantage for look and feel for your end user, it's something they'll
be more familiar with.

Having said all that, I personaly prefer squeak. Something about how
its laid out coupled with the power of Morphic and the availability of
Croquet all work towards making Squeak my prefered Smalltalk
environment.

Something like this is subjective and ultimately you have to ask
yourself what your customers are expecting. Also consider the
licensing fees for commercial use of Visual Works, in contrast to
Squeaks free all the time for all uses aspect.

If you need speed and or multiple OS level windows, Visual Works is
what I would recommend.
If you need UI flexibility and low (ie no) licensing costs Squeak is a
great pick.

Hope that helps,
Brian T


On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 18:49:07 +0200, Squeak Smalltalk
<wallenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I like Squeak.
> Is there anyone on the list that use squeak in a "real" product ?
> Or should I use VW or dolphin for our new development ?
> 
> Best Regards
> W.
> 
>



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list