[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Dave McGuire]

On Apr 22, 2004, at 1:36 PM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>> This is the point. A loooong time ago I played with smalltalk. It is 
>> an
>> ideal environement to implement GUI applications. The smalltalk 
>> language
>> has only a few, simple and orthogonal but powerful concepts. It is 
>> easy
>> to learn. The critical point is to _use_ it proper, to do things the
>> right way and use proper OO software design methods. IMHO hybrid
>> languages like C++ tend to lead the programmer to write "hybrid"
>> programms, that aren't procedural nor OO. You can't do things well
>> without "gorking" the OO paradigm.
>
> On a side note, Squeak on modest Intel and PPC machines screams, and to
> my understanding it doesn't even do anything like JIT compiling (though
> I believe some people are working on that).

   That's because it's something that's being *designed*, not thrown 
together.  OO code can be written to be fast.  I'm not saying "OO code 
is the problem", I'm saying "OO code being used as a crutch for 
incompetent programmers is the problem".  Someone should ABSOLUTELY NOT 
attempt to write code in an object-oriented language until they have a 
substantial amount of experience with procedural languages...preferably 
more than one.

   Sure, it's possible to do so without that experience...people do it 
every day.  That's what gave us things like KDE (which will slow down 
even a 2GHz processor), Mozilla, and about 90% of the crap written for 
Windows.

>   I wish I knew why it
> crawled so slowly on my Octane (Squeak runs nicely on a Pentium 166, 
> but
> it crawls on my R10k @ 250mhz).

   They're probably tuning it for one architecture at the expense of 
another...x86 assembler helpers, cache friendliness, who knows.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire          "PC users only know two 'solutions'...
Cape Coral, FL          reboot and upgrade."    -Jonathan Patschke