Re: Why are intepreters so slow today
John Nagle (nagle@netcom.com)
Tue, 19 Apr 1994 17:03:03 GMT
colin@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Colin Plumb) writes:
>In article <nagleCoD5o6.CD6@netcom.com>, John Nagle <nagle@netcom.com> wrote:
>>knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight) writes:
>>>For one thing, this is a fairly pathological benchmark. I can't speak
>>>for Python, but none of the current Smalltalk implementations do very
>>>much optimization of floating point arithmetics. Smalltalk/V Mac, in
>>>particular, has abysmal floating point (you don't say which dialect
>>>you tried).
>>
>> Arithmetic is a pathological benchmark. Right.
>For an interpreted language, it certainly is. Each operation in the
>test is one machine instruction (F.P. add, decrement, and
>conditional branch). It's hard to intrepret anything in less than
>30 instructions.
As I said, I could live with a 10x slowdown. But 1000x slowdowns
indicate something is very wrong, like doing a storage allocation for every
floating point operation.
John Nagle