RE: objective c?

[Stumpo, Cody (C.M.)]

Where would people say the java speed as a percentage of obj-c speed is now
with swarm?  Roughly, it seems like about 25% to me.  



-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 12:41 AM

PJ> I mean, post in the list about where you think we
PJ> might be in 6 months or 1 year in the future and how the java
PJ> thing will be.

Performance-wise, I think the Java layer (or any other languages layered on
the single-threaded Objective C activity library), might get to be 80%
as fast as Objective C models on the Objective C activity library.  To get
past that it would be necessary to unify Objective C object representations
with gcj Java/C++ object representations (major compiler hacking).  Such
a project would be way more time consuming than just re-implementing the
activity library in Java or C++.

My opinion is that, provided everything Java-wise *works* (and there is
certainly room for improvement), I don't really think it is a big deal
if it is, say, half as fast.  A longstanding goal for Swarm, is to
realize a scalable implementation of the logical concurrency model so
that events having the same time run on different CPUs in parallel.

Unless SDG members really want a singleminded focus on the problem
of making the existing virtual machine (i.e. activity library) faster with
the Java layer, my hope is that my time will be directed toward general
usability issues and on new parallelism implementation work.

                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.