Slate: extreme optimization

[Waldemar Kornewald]

You only talk about the tasks that Slate fits best. Slate is easy to learn and use, powerful, etc., but when you want to write a fast embedded OS for your multimedia-station in your living-room or when you want to write a video codec, you will not even get a fast FFT algorithm.
You don't know how hard it would be to implement that, do you? :)

Bye,
Waldemar

> It's possible, but not very probable. Self is possibly the closest of 
> the Smalltalk family, coming in IIRC at half the speed of C on numeric 
> benchmarks. Even then C is slower than other languages, so it's all 
> relative. 
> 
> If you truely wanted C++ performance or better a whole system compiler
> would likely be necessary, which is not out of the question. For dynamic
> compilation, I think the best you could really achieve is on par with
> some of the top Java interpreters like IBM's or Sun's. Slate has more
> dynamic baggage than Java that needs to be optimized away, but inlining
> can go a long way to getting rid of it where necessary.
> 
> I look at it a bit differently, though. At this point I have been writing 
> C/C++ code for about a decade, and I am utterly sick of it. There is so
> much more I can do in a language like Slate than I could in a similar
> amount of C/C++. The C/C++ environments are too static and closed off,
> which makes working with them a pain. So even if you have to sacrifice
> an order of magnitude in performance, you end up getting a lot more in
> return. If you view Slate not as a language, but something that will
> supercede an operating system, IDE, user environment, etc., then it doesn't
> matter a whole lot what the speed of C/C++ is, because it's not just a 
> language.
> 
> It's not about making Slate as fast as C/C++, it's about making Slate as 
> fast as Slate can possibly be! That may be slower than C/C++, or it could 
> be faster even still! Even if Slate was 1/10 the speed of C/C++ at its
> most optimized, I still would never touch C/C++ again.
> 
> Lee
> 
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 07:22:17PM +0200, Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
> > Hi Lee,
> > contratulations to your progress with Slate!
> > 
> > Now to my question: Is it possible to make Slate compile code as efficient/fast as C++? If yes, how long would the compilation take? I would like to use Slate as a complete C++ replacement (in the distant future), e.g.: for scientific or multimedia applications. I would accept compilation times that are five times longer than equivalent C++ code as only some small critical modules would have to be optimized, anyway.
> > Do you think this is possible?
> > <wondering>If so, why did no LISP or Smalltalk implement it?</wondering>
> > With interchangable GC+scheduling algorithms for specific modules/apps this could lead to a very cool language that can solve all tasks. Sounds more like a dream, heh? ;)
> > 
> > Bye,
> > Waldemar
>