johnson@m.cs.uiuc.edu (10/29/90)
Andy Ormsby (aro@cs.aber.ac.uk) wrote: >I've often seen complaints about the performance of Smalltalk. To what >extent is performance really an obstacle to the adoption of Smalltalk >these days? My (very limited) experience is that Smalltalk seems to >produce much more responsive applications than C++/Interviews. As with anything else, it depends on the application. For user-interface intensive applications, Smalltalk is plenty fast enough, and is probably just as fast as C++/Interviews. However, if you are doing a lot of computation, whether floating point or symbolic, then Smalltalk can be an order of magnitude slower than C/FORTRAN/etc. Modern Smalltalks make it possible to call C routines from Smalltalk. A common trick is to write the computation entensive part in C and call it from Smalltalk. This works well when the expensive part is fairly well contained, which is quite common. Ralph Johnson - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign