Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cam-cl!scc From: scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk Subject: Re: Smalltalk and C: A Case Study Message-ID: <335@scaup.cl.cam.ac.uk> Date: 26 Sep 88 07:20:22 GMT References: <5797@june.cs.washington.edu> Sender: news@cl.cam.ac.uk Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK Lines: 22 I sent a message to John Maloney asking about the speed of the C version of the program and the relative performance of the raw machines involved. John's reply follows ... -- Steve > The Tek 4405/6 on which the Smalltalk version was run is based on a > 16 Mhz 68020 which is three to four times as fast as a Mac Plus. The > C version of the program on the Mac Plus ran at about 200 notes per > second as I recall. The difference in the raw processing speeds of the > two machines would imply that the C program running on the faster > machine should be able to send 600-800 notes per second. So the cost > of using Smalltalk is to run four or five slower. I am not disappointed > at this; the loss of performance is offset by the ease of development > to my mind. I always expected to move the time-critical code into > efficient primitives (implemented in C). However, I never needed to > do this to get the performance I desired, which was a nice surprise. > > You may post this analysis to the net if you wish. > > -- John Maloney