[squeak-dev] Re: The Old Man

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Tue Apr 1 09:44:13 UTC 2008


Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> I was not implying that - I was referring to the many abandoned 
> projects, not the active, flourishing ones. Again, Marcus would have to 
> be more specific what specifically he had in mind. One example of "the 
> perfect is the enemy of the good" are the series of JIT compiler 
> implementations, none of which were finished, so Squeak still pretty 
> much has the same interpreter it had ten years ago.

Uhm, isn't *that* just a precise argument to the opposite? Incremental 
improvements instead of half-finished research projects? Instead of 
rewriting the VM everytime and not quite finishing it ever, the speed f 
the VM has doubled over the last ten years:

0 tinyBenchmarks; Squeak1.1:
    '82740788 bytecodes/sec; 3818244 sends/sec'

0 tinyBenchmarks; Squeak3.8:
   '191760299 bytecodes/sec; 5460228 sends/sec'

Coincidentally, some of these improvements (like the at-cache) are 
direct results of the more researchy efforts.

Cheers,
   - Andreas


> The positive way of 
> expressing CADT would be "burn the disk packs" and in particular in a 
> research environment that is indeed the best you can do. It's simply a 
> different motivation - do you build to have, or do you build to know? 
> The latter does not require completion to be successful.
> 
> - Bert -
> 
>> Best regards,
>> Nikolay Suslov
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Bert Freudenberg 
>> <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Well, Marcus would have to answer that himself. But there are a lot on
>> unfinished projects around Squeak, like the half dozen or so GUI
>> builders, and you can certainly think of more. OTOH this problem is
>> not specific to Squeak, it is just the reality of a lot of unpaid
>> development work which people do for fun, a.k.a. CADT:
>>
>>        http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
>>
>> - Bert -
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 




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