Brian Tabone <brian.tabone at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
Good grief - only twice as fast? That's actually a bit worrying. I'd
have guessed more in the 5-20 times faster, at least for anything that
involves running a lot of Smalltalk code. The VW dynamic translation is
very sophisticated and very highly developed as you'd expect from
something with around twenty years of work behind it.
> 
> 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.
It's not as sophisticated yet but Squeak now has the beginnings of
multiple host windows as well ( See posts on 'Areithfa Ffenestri' for
example). Lots more work to do on it, so if you're in need of such
capability let us know and see if you can help.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: SG: Show Garbage