Performance wise Pharo is doing very well on that front because its one of the very few dynamic languages to come with a JIT VM.
Generally speaking because you are talking about games, it will depend on the game. Both Android and iOS they rely heavily on C libraries, libraries that Pharo can use. So performance is not our problem nor we need hardware VM support because graphics are already heavily hardware accelerated. The problem for pharo is support of those platforms, like multi touch, a more multi touch friendly GUI etc. Generally speaking expect to get your hands dirty on making C libraries working with Pharo on those platforms a lot more than worrying about VM speed. Even for heavy 3d games would could use something like Unreal or Unity together with Pharo. On iOS it may be an issue because Apple allows for a single executable. So the problem here is not speed, its the diffirent way of doing things on those platforms that would require a lot of boilercode to make things work smoothly. This is why game devs prefer using something like Unity and Unreal that are well tested and offer all those luxuries outside the box without you having to worry about that. On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 12:31 PM Victor RENE <victor-rene....@outlook.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I am new to Pharo and would like to understand a few things. > I can search by myself, but I do not know the code base yet, so: > > [Questions] > Pharo image: > Serialization, deserialization, where is the code? > Pharo vm (Cog/Spur): > Rendering loop and event loops. done with SDL2, where is the code? > Message passing, object hierarchy lookup, where is the code? > Pharo minimal: > How to get a working version? The builds I tried (4.0) crashed. > > [Purpose] > My goal is work out an image/vm with minimum overhead. For example, > let's say I want to build a modern multi-touch application. > Pharo's environment looks promising on the live coding/debugging side, > but what about the performance? Lack of responsiveness would not be > acceptable (think about design differences between Android/iOS). > > [Context] > I want to understand if the object oriented nature of Smalltalk is > the reason for the lack of apps of this nature (as far as I can tell). > For example, games have been done with Lisp: Jack and Daxter (on the PS2, > by Naughty Dogs). There are also game engines for the JVM > (https://www.lwjgl.org/). > Dedicated hardware has been built for either Lisp or Forth. I can't seem > to find any hardware built specifically to power Smalltalk software. > Yet as far as I can tell, it's the big time for software virtual machines, > because the new generation of hardware will be supporting them. > (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032295) > > UPDATE: I am reading through "Evaluating message passing control techniques > in Smalltalk" ( > https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2440118_Evaluating_Message_Passing_Control_Techniques_in_Smalltalk > ). > I am getting a better picture of the whole, please direct to more such > papers. > > Thanks, > > Victor RENE > Software engineer, > Game designer, Writer > > Blog: http://victor-rene.com > Projects: http://logiqub.com > > tel: +33 6 26 83 61 76 > email: victor-r...@outlook.com > >
