VW 7 Competitive With Strongtalk

James Robertson. If putting the code in normal Smalltalk methods and running in a loop 100,000, 1,000,000 (depends on the test) isn't enough, I'm not sure what to say. The allocation code looks like this:

allocSpeedTest
	"SpeedTester new allocSpeedTest"

	| log |
	ObjectMemory doOrFinishIncrementalGC.
	log := BenchLogger new.
	log testName: 'Alloc Test'.
	log testResult: (Time
			millisecondsToRun: 
				[100000 timesRepeat: [Array new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10; new: 10].
				ObjectMemory doOrFinishIncrementalGC]).
	^log

In the Strongtalk system, I changed the GC reference to System globalGarbageCollect. So here we have code, in a method, iterating over a the allocation 100,000 times. To get the benchmark code, either grab the BenchBundle from our public repository, or grab this 3.x compatible file-in

(Note by Strongtalk founder David Griswold: Not! The following benchmarks were not run correctly, and are comparing VisualWorks to the Strongtalk interpreter, not the compiler. For example, a quick benchmark allocating Objects shows that Strongtalk allocates 6 times *faster* than VisualWorks, not *slower* as shown below. See the Strongtalk FAQ for guidelines on how to run benchmarks correctly on Strongtalk. The table below will look *much* different when the benchmarks are run right! I stand by our claim that Strongtalk is *much* faster than Visualworks. For discussion, post to comp.lang.smalltalk under the "Strongtalk Benchmarking" thread.) (changed c.l.strongtalk to smalltalk)

Years ago now, Sun bought up the Animorphic (Hotspot) VM, and spent three years trying to bring the technology to Java. They have now released the original Smalltalk technology - follow this link. I have run a set of benchmarks against both the Strongtalk system and the new VW 7 release. In between crashes of the Strongtalk VM, here are the results - all times are milliseconds. The code I executed can be found in the public repository, package BenchBundle. All times are in milliseconds. The test machine is a PIII Windows box, 256 MB RAM, running Windows ME.

Test	VW 5i.4	VW 7	Strongtalk (in workspace)	Strongtalk
Allocation Test	323	353	418	386
Array Write Test	749	526	1701	982
Dictionary Write Test	109	100	171	132
Float Point Test	3022	1687	3398	3833
Integer Test	264	260	1633	1632
Ordered Collection Iteration	1091	1042	1469	1468
Ordered Collection Write	243	223	418	394
Polymorphism Test	692	655	948	969
Stream Write Test	383	372	12843	11875
String Compare	729	694	626	604

As you can see - VisualWorks performs faster on these benchmarks(in most cases, much faster) than the Strongtalk technology.