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Re: GOOPS (Re: Everyone is thinking about the future)
Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:
> > > I was thinking more about the GMP library inclusion. The one big
> > > problem now seems to be on how to efficiently add numbers. The
> > > GOOPS type dispatch seems nice, but i think GOOPS would be a
> > > little overhead.
> >
> > I'd say GOOPS should be used whenever possible, specially if
> > the problem is at least remotely similar to object-orientation,
> > type abstraction, polymorphism or generic functions.
>
> Mikael gave me reason to believe that the GOOPS dispatch was quite
> competitive with the current implementations of +, *, and so on.
> Since CLOS-style multiple dispatch is so natural for expressing this
> sort of notion, it would be a shame to reject it without hard facts in
> hand.
That's not the impression I got from his posts on this list. I'm led
to believe that it's competitive with interpreted function dispatch,
but internal C tag dispatch is faster. (Where competitive is "maybe a
couple of extra machine instructions, and thus virtually
indistinguishable given the amount of work done anyway for function
dispatch".)
--
Harvey Stein
Bloomberg LP
hjstein@bfr.co.il