Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!stc!praxis!kolmogorov!johnr
From: johnr@praxis.co.uk (John Richards)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Efficiency of OOPLs
Message-ID: <3342@newton.praxis.co.uk>
Date: 16 Nov 88 09:05:58 GMT
References: <8335@nlm-mcs.arpa> <6590068@hplsla.HP.COM> <3514@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Sender: news@praxis.co.uk
Reply-To: johnr@praxis.co.uk (John Richards)
Organization: Praxis Systems plc, Bath, UK
Lines: 31

In article <3514@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> david@beowulf.JPL.NASA.GOV (David Smyth) writes:
>>
>>And among object oriented languages, only C++ seems to have the
>>runtime efficiencies to make it viable for most commercially 
>>developed code.

>In article <6590068@hplsla.HP.COM> jima@hplsla.HP.COM (Jim Adcock) writes:
>I hear this over and over.  And it just is NOT true.  Sit down at a
>LISP workstation, and do som ewindowing stuff.  Sit down at a SUN, a Mac,
>something running Smalltalk, Mesa, or what have you, and you will find
>comparable performance.

I'll second Jim's message.  We are using Objective-C for user interface
work and yes it is for a commercial product with real live users.  The vast
majority of the code runs perfectly well with no performance problems.  At
the moment we have one or two areas where it needs to run a bit faster, but
we're doing things the proper way round - design it, code it and
then, ONLY IF YOU HAVE TO, optimise.

There are still people who spend too much time worrying about the efficiency
of their compilers.  Okay, there are applications which require every last
ounce of speed but often this can be narrowed down to small bits of code
that are executed frequently.

I once knew a student who was extremely proud of optimising his program
for analyzing results from an experiment he was doing.  "I managed to cut
the run-time by 30 seconds!"  He was less pleased when I pointed out that
it had taken him two hours' work and he only ran the program once a day on
average.

                                      John Richards