We often talk about making the VM faster. How about making it slower? In 1980, there were some optimizations that were needed for Smalltalk to be even usable, but now: - Moore's Law has theoretically given us 131072 more computing power (2^((2014-1980)/2)) - Cog runs up to 3x slower than C [1] - Ruby, which is widely accepted, seems to be much slower than Cog [2]
For example, inlined functions can be baffling for new users. I just ran into this myself when writing an #ifNil:ifNotNil: that was not picked up by the system [3], and Ungar and Smith describe several cases in the History of Self (pg. 9-5).
How many of these are premature optimizations that can be eliminated, or at least turned off by default until they're actually needed? I know Clement mentioned in [3] that some make a big difference, but it would certainly make the system more uniform and easy to understand.
[1] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2011-February/042489.ht... [2] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=... [3] https://www.mail-archive.com/pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org/msg11694.html
----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Making-a-Slower-VM-tp4742391.html Sent from the Squeak VM mailing list archive at Nabble.com.