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