3 ms·

It's a very noisy datapoint, but compare performance VW Smalltalk to NodeJS: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/smalltalk.html

It's a very noisy datapoint, but compare performance VW Smalltalk to NodeJS: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/smalltalk.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... VW Smalltalk is between 2x and 27x times slower than Javascript. And Pharo is slower yet than VW Smalltalk: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/vw-pharo.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... Nevertheless, as the front page the the Benchmarks Game is careful to mention, benchmark performance is 1) not necessarily representative of real-world performance and 2) not even always important in the greater context! Still, it's sad that Smalltalk & company haven't received the VM optimization attention that JS has. What would our world look like if Brendan Eich had gone for Smalltalk instead of creating a language from scratch?

jhgb 5y ago
> Still, it's sad that Smalltalk & company haven't received the VM optimization attention that JS has. Well...if you consider that the heritage of V8 in Node.js kind of goes back to StrongTalk, I'd say Smalltalk has received more of it than perhaps many people think. Unfortunately StrongTalk didn't really succeed on the market for the same reasons as many other Smalltalk implementations - proprietary nature and exclusivity doesn't really help you in the long run against worse-but-cheaper-and-more-accessible solutions.
Qem 5y ago
Those benchmarks are quite old, from Pharo 5 in 2017. It would be interesting to see a updated version. Eliot Miranda and Clément Béra are working on speculative inlining for the JIT compiler. From http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog/ http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog/ - "With Clément Béra I’m working on adaptive optimisation (a.k.a. speculative inlining) at the image level, optimising from bytecode to bytecode. We call this project Sista, which stands for Speculative Inlining Smalltalk Architecture. Clément’s image-level (entirely in Smalltalk above the virtual machine) adaptive optimizer is called Scorch. Sista should offer about a -66% speed-up (3x) for conventional Smalltalk code. The combination of Spur and Sista should yield almost a 5x speedup over the original Cog."
- igouy 5y ago
  > Pharo 5 in 2017 Seems to be tagged 2020 — 5.0-202002121043 Wed Feb 12 11:06:45 UTC 2020 gcc 5.4.0 [Production Spur 64-bit VM] The pharo.version file contains — 80
  - Qem 5y ago
    I'm sorry. You're right. I did a stupid mistake by confounding the vm version with Pharo version. I can't edit my post anymore, but please, anyone reading this, disregard the "Those benchmarks are quite old, from Pharo 5 in 2017" part.
    - igouy 5y ago
      The person who receives the contact email usually allows posts to be re-opened.
    - igouy 5y ago
      The Pharo 9.0 vm from — https://files.pharo.org/get-files/90/pharo64-linux-stable.zip https://files.pharo.org/get-files/90/pharo64-linux-stable.zi... — is the same as Pharo 8.0 — 5.0-202002121043 Wed Feb 12 11:06:45 UTC 2020 gcc 5.4.0 [Production Spur 64-bit VM]
e12e 5y ago
Just run your smalltalk/self on the js vm... https://lively-next.org/ https://lively-next.org/

jhgb 5y ago

> Still, it's sad that Smalltalk & company haven't received the VM optimization attention that JS has. Well...if you consider that the heritage of V8 in Node.js kind of goes back to StrongTalk, I'd say Smalltalk has received more of it than perhaps many people think. Unfortunately StrongTalk didn't really succeed on the market for the same reasons as many other Smalltalk implementations - proprietary nature and exclusivity doesn't really help you in the long run against worse-but-cheaper-and-more-accessible solutions.

Qem 5y ago

Those benchmarks are quite old, from Pharo 5 in 2017. It would be interesting to see a updated version. Eliot Miranda and Clément Béra are working on speculative inlining for the JIT compiler. From http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog/ http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/about-cog/ - "With Clément Béra I’m working on adaptive optimisation (a.k.a. speculative inlining) at the image level, optimising from bytecode to bytecode. We call this project Sista, which stands for Speculative Inlining Smalltalk Architecture. Clément’s image-level (entirely in Smalltalk above the virtual machine) adaptive optimizer is called Scorch. Sista should offer about a -66% speed-up (3x) for conventional Smalltalk code. The combination of Spur and Sista should yield almost a 5x speedup over the original Cog."

igouy 5y ago
> Pharo 5 in 2017 Seems to be tagged 2020 — 5.0-202002121043 Wed Feb 12 11:06:45 UTC 2020 gcc 5.4.0 [Production Spur 64-bit VM] The pharo.version file contains — 80
- Qem 5y ago
  I'm sorry. You're right. I did a stupid mistake by confounding the vm version with Pharo version. I can't edit my post anymore, but please, anyone reading this, disregard the "Those benchmarks are quite old, from Pharo 5 in 2017" part.
  - igouy 5y ago
    The person who receives the contact email usually allows posts to be re-opened.
  - igouy 5y ago
    The Pharo 9.0 vm from — https://files.pharo.org/get-files/90/pharo64-linux-stable.zip https://files.pharo.org/get-files/90/pharo64-linux-stable.zi... — is the same as Pharo 8.0 — 5.0-202002121043 Wed Feb 12 11:06:45 UTC 2020 gcc 5.4.0 [Production Spur 64-bit VM]

e12e 5y ago

Just run your smalltalk/self on the js vm... https://lively-next.org/ https://lively-next.org/