[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 02:07:22PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
>   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.

I think I can agree with that.  Maybe it is OK to learn OO first, but
don't let them near anything critical (say something that could in
anyway be called systems programming) until they also learn procedural 
well. 
 
> >  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.

I think there is no hand written assembly code, but I could be wrong.
Pretty much all of it is written in smalltalk, but obviously the code
that actually opens a window (or initializes the graphics hardware) has
to be written in something else, as do some other small parts.  The
interpreter is written in smalltalk, but there is also some smalltalk
code that compiles the interpreter into C, and this is to be used for
bootstrapping it on new platforms.

As cool as smalltalk is, I keep being drawn more to more lispish things,
and CMUCL does indeed work fine on Irix.  Currently, I use CMUCL on Irix
and SBCL on Solaris and Linux.  At somepoint I will also probably bring
up OpenMCL on PPC (either the coming 9500, or else linux PPC on a
6500).  Nearly everything is compatible between the three (the biggest
sticking point I can think of at the moment is thread support).