Hello David, DF> focuses on just reading a small (for us) 123 Mb data file on disk. The DF> program takes about 166 seconds to run compared to 1.2 seconds for an DF> equivalent C version (140x faster than Squeak version).
number crunching and raw speed are not the points where Smalltalk excels. 0 tinyBenchmarks gives '322824716 bytecodes/sec; 8945704 sends/sec' which is about 9 million sends on my 1.8 GHz Pentium M. In the browser when you will switch from Source to Byte codes in the lowest pane (rightmost button) you will see the many sends in your code. Some of these code fragments (e.g. the arithmetic) would be a lot faster in any compiling language. With this you can estimate the performance you can expect. If it would only take one send per byte read from the file my Computer would take about 10 seconds for 100MB. That's the price for dynamically looking up the receiver's class for every send. So I guess this application is better left for other languages. Cheers, Herbert mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners