On 20-02-2013, at 12:26 PM, Stéphane Rollandin <lecteur at zogotounga.net> wrote:

> Thanks for the feedback ! I'll have a look at all this...
> 
> Another possible cause of slowdown would be Fractions appearing where not expected, since in Squeak 2.8 Integer>>#/ never returns a Fraction; I have to check this out.

Hmm, interesting idea. It could waste some time, certainly.

FIrst suspect has to be stuff added to the step code that hasn't been carefully thought about for speed. Too many people just assume a faster machine will come along Real Soon Now and solve the problem for them. Ain't gonna happen any more. Single core performance has hardly changed for several years, multi-core performance is blocked by memory performance and cost per transistor is flat.

I propose that everybody buys as Raspberry Pi to run their code on and at least tries to improve it for performance once in a while. For $35 it's a really cheap software development tool.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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