Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2.fluke 9/24/84; site vax2.fluke.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!dan From: dan@fluke.UUCP (Dan Everhart) Newsgroups: net.lang.st80 Subject: Re: Stupid Questions about Berkeley SmallTalk Message-ID: <432@vax2.fluke.UUCP> Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 15:37:16 EST Article-I.D.: vax2.432 Posted: Thu Mar 7 15:37:16 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 06:21:21 EST References: <419@harvard.ARPA> Distribution: net Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA Lines: 30 I have not (yet) used BS for a real application, but I will make observations based on the few toys I have built with it. > > 1) How much slower is Berkely SmallTalk than C on a Sun 2 workstation? Lots. On the other hand you will probably spend a lot more time in development using C. Smalltalk might provide a lot of stuff that you can use already built in. With 1 meg of memory it is so slow that it's unusable. With 2 megs it usable, but still slow enough to be annoying. I suspect more memory would make it faster but have not tried it. > 2) Is it stable and fairly bug free? As far as I can tell, no. Although the latest release fixed some of the worst bugs, there are still references to unimplemented things floating around, and occasional blow-ups. The ability to maintain versions and recover from crashes that is provided by the Smalltalk environment helps a lot though. This is printed in bold face in one of the documents that comes with BS: "Beware: Although we rely on BS, it is a research vehicle and not production software. Expect bugs (we certainly do)." In spite of all this I would recommend you consider BS carefully; there are a lot of advantages to developing software with Smalltalk. Dan Everhart John Fluke Mfg. Co. { decvax!microsof, uw-beaver, allegra, lbl-csam, ssc-vax } !fluke!dan