🚀 go-pugleaf

Jeff Sutherland wrote:


> Systems the size of many large Smalltalk systems have not begun to be built in
> Java. The guys at Sun will tell you its not ready for prime time yet. They would
> like to deescalate the hype a little bit.

Java is just about to take off. Java has climbed quite a bit faster than the Smalltalk 
baloon in its early days. Backing from industry is much stronger than it earlier
(ever?) was for Smalltalk.

> Java doesn't even have a modern garbage collector and its performance is
> terrible, 10-30 times slower than C. Borland intends to fix this before year's end.

I wouldn't call any Smalltalk garbage collector modern. Probably, the most modern one
is the one in BETA based on the train algorithm which was implemented by two students
in their thesis work. ParcPlace & Co. better had a look at it ...

> There is a benchmark in this month's Smalltalk Report showing how a Smalltalk
> application can be tuned to run *faster* than C.

In Smalltalk all methods are bound dynamically. No way method invocation can ever be
faster as function invocation in C with function addresses determined at compile time.
With some people you just can't argue that Smalltalk is slow. 

Java has room for optimization, though. Because there is type information on class
level. I think that's how the people from SUN managed to make Self that fast. But I
don't know exactly. Hoope this will put pressure on Smalltalk vendors.


> I expect that many C++ programmers will begin to use Java as an application language
> with C++ seamlessly interfaced as the object-oriented assembler, which is what it was
> designed for in the first place.
> 
> The beauty of Java is that it is Smalltalk for C++ programmers. We need it.

In my opinion there is much truth in this. Fortunately, Java is file oriented and not
image oriented. You can write a small programm and execute it quickly whereas in
Smalltalk you have to startup the entire image which takes a lot of time. Java is
right in the middle between the two extremes: C++ and Smalltalk. It's the right tool
at the right time.

Regards, Olli

_______________________________________________
Oliver Plohmann              +41 41 749 56 52
Software Engineer            opl@al.esec.ch
Autoline
ESEC SA, Cham, Switzerland