Largest Provider of Commercial Smalltalk
Cincom is one of the largest commercial providers of Smalltalk, with twice as many partners and customers than other commercial providers.
Tom Nies
Polycephaly
Most commercial applications do not leverage the power of today’s multi-core CPUs, largely in part to the fact that it is not trivial to do so. This is a capability that product management thought would be a large benefit to Smalltalkers. The product team thought this would be a good feature to have and challenged engineering to develop something in this space. It was a challenge because doing something meaningful was daunting.
What came from that challenge was our multi-core solution. The result fit the requirements of product management: simple, pragmatic, easy to use and effective. The framework our engineers developed is called Polycephaly, a term meaning, “many heads”.
In talking to customers, several seem to be using it and enjoying its advantages. In fact, one customer has seen a reduction of processing time by 72%!!-effective indeed, under proper circumstances.
We are successfully using Polycephaly in our project. One thing we use it for is to parallelize execution of (time-consuming) unit tests that check code quality. These tests execute at 28% of original time, when using Polycephaly on a quad-core box. – Current Cincom® VisualWorks® customer
To see more examples of Polycephaly, Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, has put together this presentation:
So, what’s holding you back from experiencing for yourself this incredible feature? If you have an older version of VisualWorks, why not upgrade so you can begin using this ability? If you are a current customer or a developer, why not be a hero and start making your applications run faster with it today?
- To download VisualWorks free and try out Polycephaly for yourself, click here.
- To learn more about the other powerful features of VisualWorks, click here.
- To discuss this feature and others like it with Arden Thomas, our Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, read his blog.
