Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: dbuck@infoweb.magi.com (David Buck)
Subject: Re: Smalltalk Arithmetic Speed vs other languages
Sender: news@magi.com
Message-ID: <DB0qJq.C4x@magi.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 1995 03:47:50 GMT
References: <DAzt3x.BxF.0.bloor@torfree.net>
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Organization: Magi Data Consulting
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In article <DAzt3x.BxF.0.bloor@torfree.net>,
Charlene Ng <bb978@torfree.net> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>   Our company is thinking of using Smalltalk to implement a 
>trader application.  The main functions of the application
>is to be able to calculate financial formulas (e.g. bond
>calculator, mortgage maturity date).  The response time
>has to be fast (preferrably under one second).
>
>    My question is: Is Smalltalk suitable for such a task? 
>How Smalltalk arithmetic speed as compared to say Visual
>Basic?  Is there any benchmarks on such a comparison 
>between Smalltalk and other languages on arithmetic speed?
>
>   Any comments would be appreciated.  Thanks.

On a 486/66 running VisualWorks, you can perform 12 million integer 
calculations in 10 seconds.  This is 2 to 5 times slower than C doing 
'long' calculations.

For floating point, 12 million calculations takes 50.5 seconds which is 
10 to 20 times slower than raw C depending on which C compiler you use. 
These numbers are actually worst cases for Smalltalk vs. C++.  In recent 
benchmarks I did, Smalltalk turned out to be comparable to C++ for most 
things except for integer and floating point math.  Smalltalk's 
collections classes were usually faster than RogueWave's Tools.h++ for 
C++.

David Buck
dbuck@magi.com
The Object People

