On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 06:04:49 -0700, Dominique Dutoit  
<dominiqued at versateladsl.be> wrote:

> His argument doesn't make sense. The performance gain resulting by the  
> use of primitives instead of objets is marginal, simply because these  
> primitives have to be manipulated by calling methods or functions and  
> these operations are not cheap. Fast, maybe, but not dramatically faster.

Well, he's working for Microsoft now; he has a lot of apologizing to do  
for .NET.<S>

> When I wrote a plugin to access HID devices from Squeak, I made an  
> example with code stripped from the previous support for pen tablets.  
> This example is interesting because it keeps an history of the pressure  
> put on the tip of the pen and does some computation to create a  
> calligraphic-like effect, something missing in my previous attempts. And  
> while a lot of messages are sent (Collection, Array, Morphic, plugin  
> access), it is not slower than the Cocoa version, which is using  
> primitives for handling the numbers.

Like my daddy used to say, you never know where the bottlenecks are until  
you've tested.

>> 2. Doesn't Smalltalk have primitive strings, ints, bools, etc?
>
> Yes and no. Squeak has primitives for objects requiring heavy  
> computation, or more exactly, plugins called by methods wanting a bit  
> more punch from the processor. The plugins can be internal or external  
> to the VM.

That's what I thought. I knew the "can't use pure objects" thing was  
malarkey. I remember getting acceptable (but not great) results from  
VisualAge Smalltalk back in '94.