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From: moorebj@odin.icd.ab.com (Bruce J. Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Stand-Alone .exe's & C libraries
Message-ID: <2216@abvax.AB.Com>
Date: 19 Apr 91 21:50:14 GMT
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In article <4321.280dd75f@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> klimas@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com writes:
	...Some reasonable stuff about standalone .exes deleted.

>	Yes, The Floating Point library in the goodies package is
>	just such an example of how to interface ST/V286 into an external
>	C program.  ST/V286 does have one limitation that ST/V-PM doesn't
>	WRT interfacing into external libraries.  The functions are accessed
>	via what are called primitives (desribed in detail in the manual)
>	and although you can have a fair sized number of user defined
>	primitives, the code associated with a particular primitive must
>	be <64kb in size.  Another reality that drives C fanatics crazy
>	is that there is not much to be gained by using C based functions
>	in terms of speed or memory.  We have actually seen a reduction
>	in total program size when we rewrote some C based libraries in 
>	Smalltalk/V-286 and the performance was just the same if not faster.

	A reality that drives *some* Smalltalk fanatics crazy is that
	Smalltalk is based on primitives written in C and other languages.
	If it were slower to write them in C or assembler it wouldn't be
	done.  Digitalk says that their primitives are used (among other
	things) for "higher-level but performance-critical methods such
	as stream access and block transfers".  In short, C is not a
	four letter word.

	I appreciate some of the gains to be realized by OO (so no language
	flames please), but it seems to me that the original poster was
	interested either in optimizing a specific performance problem
	area or reusing already written and tested code.