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python on the smalltalk VM

Dave LeBlanc whisper at oz.net
Thu Apr 19 13:49:57 EDT 2001 
Side note: David Unger developed Generational Garbage Collection while
at UC Berkeley working on a project called "Smalltalk On A Risc"
(SOAR).

Dave LeBlanc

On 18 Apr 2001 23:04:41 -0400, Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:

>"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> writes:
>
>> http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/html/SmalltalkSolutions2001%232.html
>
>> > Python is a big part for the execution engine, this is a new
>> > area. The Smalltalk VM runs Python 10 to 100x faster.
>
>Sounds somewhat dubious to me, but I should point out the paper
>"Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical" by Craig Chambers
>and David Ungar.  Craig Chambers is one of the designers of the
>language, Self, which is a direct successor to Smalltalk.  Self had
>the aims of being of *the* most beautiful and orthogonal language
>known to man.  This also made it one of the most difficult to optimize
>and consequently, one of the most inefficient.  (In Self, even
>integers are full-fledged objects that accept messages just like any
>other object.  Integers in Self can also be used to create derived
>objects that can override the usual integer methods.)  Self is a
>*very* beautiful and elegant language, though sometimes one wonders if
>they didn't take orthogonality just a bit too far.
>
>After many years of research, they came up with a compiler for Self
>that would generate code that runs about one half to one third the
>speed of compiled C code.  This is 30 to 50 times faster than Python.
>I see no reason that the same techniques couldn't be applied to speed
>up Python, but it would probably be a hell of a lot of work and slow
>down compile times significantly.
>
>|>oug
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