Newbie questions: A frequently walkback. Dolphin in comparison to Squeak.

Hi,

I'm a newbie to Dolphin and my english insn't exactly good either. Sorry :).
I've been experimenting with multithreading etc. and whatever I try, I
frequently get the same walkback, titled:
 "Primitive ProcessorScheduler>>enableAsyncEvents: failed (2)"
I use Dolphin 2.1. The situation remains the same with a fresh image.
For example, following code runs smoothly in Squeak, but in Dolphin I get
that walkback after perhaps 100 iterations.

[1 to: 1000 do: [:i| Transcript show: i printString, ' '. (Delay
forMilliseconds: 1000) wait]] fork.
[1 to: 1000 do: [:i| Transcript show: 'X '. (Delay forMilliseconds: 1000)
wait]] fork.
[1 to: 1000 do: [:i| Transcript show: 'Y '. (Delay forMilliseconds: 1000)
wait]] fork.
[1 to: 1000 do: [:i| Transcript show: 'Z '. (Delay forMilliseconds: 1000)
wait]] fork.

Any idea?
Btw.: Squeak is appealing to me too (especially since vers.2.8) and I'm
uncertain in which system I should invest much time. Could you please tell
me your personel
opinion on Dolphin in comparison to Squeak? (Things I "know": Dolphin is
faster. Squeak is available on many platforms. Squeak seems to be "richer"
and more complex. Morphic seems nice). What else? (Remeber, I don't know
much about vers.>2.1 of Dolphin)

Thank you,
Raymond

Hi

Actually I want to ask here.
What is the big difference between Processor>>sleep: and Process>>wait ?

> Btw.: Squeak is appealing to me too (especially since vers.2.8) and I'm
> uncertain in which system I should invest much time. Could you please tell
> me your personel
> opinion on Dolphin in comparison to Squeak? (Things I "know": Dolphin is
> faster. Squeak is available on many platforms. Squeak seems to be "richer"
> and more complex. Morphic seems nice). What else? (Remeber, I don't know
> much about vers.>2.1 of Dolphin)

What I heard from Bill is that Morphic can not properly support architecture
of MVP, which is, as OA says, _better_ than MVC.
Squeak use a translating method rather than Interpreter method.
Translators are said to be faster that Interpreters. OA says not that much
fast but sometimes slower. The biggest problem is translator is that it is
not flexible.

Take a look for a post that Bill or Blair made before at Dolphin.smalltalk
newsgroup.

Have a good one
Hwa Jong Oh

"Raymond Tiefenthal" <[hidden email]> wrote:


I tried it with Dolpin 3.0 and had no problems running a couple of
hundred times

>
>Any idea?
>Btw.: Squeak is appealing to me too (especially since vers.2.8) and I'm
>uncertain in which system I should invest much time. Could you please tell
>me your personel
>opinion on Dolphin in comparison to Squeak? (Things I "know": Dolphin is
>faster. Squeak is available on many platforms. Squeak seems to be "richer"
>and more complex. Morphic seems nice). What else? (Remeber, I don't know
>much about vers.>2.1 of Dolphin)

Squeak is nice to dabble with. It runs on many platforms and is free.
I believe it also follows the original specifications of Smalltalk-80
closely.
But the UI really falls short and clumsy given todays GUIs.  It is
slow and there is no nice way to interface to Windows COM objects such
as ADO, ODBC and other stuff.

Dolphin is really cool. It is a pleasure to work with and is well
supported. It has a Windows native UI and does interface to COM. (The
new version 4.0 is supposed to be even better but I haven't looked at
it yet.  The only "down" side is that you have to pay for Dolphin
starting at a modest $70.

If you plan to use Windows, Dolphin is a much better choice.

Costas

Hwa Jong,

> > Btw.: Squeak is appealing to me too (especially since vers.2.8) and I'm
> > uncertain in which system I should invest much time. Could you please
tell
> > me your personel
> > opinion on Dolphin in comparison to Squeak? (Things I "know": Dolphin is
> > faster. Squeak is available on many platforms. Squeak seems to be
"richer"
> > and more complex. Morphic seems nice). What else? (Remeber, I don't know
> > much about vers.>2.1 of Dolphin)
>
> What I heard from Bill is that Morphic can not properly support
architecture
> of MVP, which is, as OA says, _better_ than MVC.
> Squeak use a translating method rather than Interpreter method.
> Translators are said to be faster that Interpreters. OA says not that much
> fast but sometimes slower. The biggest problem is translator is that it is
> not flexible.

Squeak's Morphic doesn't run on top of MVC either. The Squeakers would say
it is substantially better than MVC and, probably, MVP. I don't know enough
about Morphic to comment about it's flexibility (although it does have some
neat UI features). Mainline Squeak is still an *interpreter* not a
translator. It is typically slower than Dolphin's interpeter.

There have been several attempts at producing a translator for Squeak. The
latest is Jitter3 which has only recently appeared (for the Mac only as yet
I think). The previous 2 attempts were, IIRC, rejected as the speed up was
not significant enough to warrant the extra complexity of a JIT (Just In
Time translator). I believe that the early tests on Jitter3 have shown a
benchmark speed up of 3-5x but a real world speed up in the order of 30%.
This would tend to suggest that GC and other issues play a large part in
Squeak's performance; not just raw bytecode speed.. Jitter3 has some
interesting technology behind it so it's worth watching what happens in
future.

Best regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
http://www.object-arts.com

---
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http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/FrontPage.htm
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thx for your time!

> Squeak is nice to dabble with. It runs on many platforms and is free.
> I believe it also follows the original specifications of Smalltalk-80
> closely.
> But the UI really falls short and clumsy given todays GUIs.  It is
> slow and there is no nice way to interface to Windows COM objects such
> as ADO, ODBC and other stuff.

yes the old UI of squeak (which is there at startup) is ugly. Morphic (the
new UI) is nicer.

> Dolphin is really cool.

agree:)

> It is a pleasure to work with and is well
> supported. It has a Windows native UI and does interface to COM. (The
> new version 4.0 is supposed to be even better but I haven't looked at
> it yet.  The only "down" side is that you have to pay for Dolphin
> starting at a modest $70.
> If you plan to use Windows, Dolphin is a much better choice.

My goal at the moment, is to understand smalltalk better and get more
experience. I guess I'll stick to squeak at the moment, because of features
like categories, version control, and all the other help I get from squeak.
I like the method finder best, you pass it arguments and the answer and it
lists the corresponding methods . For example "3. 4. 7" answers the method
#+. " 'abrtdg'. 'g' " answers #last. "{3.74}.3" answers methods like
#asInteger, #rounded, #truncated. I love that tool:) I'm sure Dolphin 4.0
has some of those features and tools now, though. As a resume, I feel,
squeak 2.8 gives me much more support than dolphin 2.1, but both are great.

Raymond