>  I made some benchmarks with Dolphin Smalltalk (a pure Smalltalk
> bytecode interpreter) and O'Caml (using ocamlopt) a few months ago. To
> my great surprise, Dolphin Samlltalk outperformed O'Caml by a factor of
> 4 over various tests IIRC. I think the same results may be obtained with
> other modern big numbers implementations against O'Caml's one.
[...]

What do you know about Caml big numbers library ? Are you sure to have
used the proper layer of the library tuned to performance or have you
used the casual layer tuned to coding facility ?

What do you know of the Smalltalk big numbers library ? In which
language is it written ? What are the algorithms used ?

What were your benchmark programs ? What are your figures ?

Be serious on such a topic please! Comparing arithmetic packages is
not a trivial task and you cannot state ``Dolphin Samlltalk
outperformed O'Caml by a factor of 4'' without strong arguments and
evidence that this is indeed true.

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/


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