Jesse Welton wrote:
Yes, experimenting with changing the generator to use integers, I found it to be much slower, and figured that must be why it was changed to use floats. If I recall correctly, it was almost 50 times as slow, which puzzled me. That it runs into LargePositiveIntegers helps explain that, but I'm still not sure why it should be so *much* slower.
Although you see primitives in the LargeInteger methods, they are only placeholders -- they all map to primitiveFail in the VM. So LargeInteger code actually runs entirely in Smalltalk.
-- Dwight