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Comment by JohnStrange | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so lot's of praise for a language. But I have three questions that aren't answered by the article:

1.) How fast are programs written in Pharao?

2.) Is it possible to write complete and halfway modern looking desktop end-consumer GUI applications in Pharao?

3.) How good is it at parallel programming (i.e. multicore support, not just concurrency with green threads)?

I'm always interested in learning a new language, if not just for fun. Currently my new language on the Todo list is Nim. However, I do not want to take a look at a language for which the answer to all of the above questions is "Meh".

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1) Last time I tried it was reasonably fast for a dynamic language - somewhat slower than javascript (V8) but faster than python (cpython) to give you a ballpark

2) Yes, but ou will not use native widgets. The way you write applications is: you write code by modifying the behaviour of objects in the Pharo application (which is your editor, debugger, GUI, version control system and so on), then you strip off the parts you don't need (such as what you used to write the application in the first place). Hence you will probably use the default Pharo widget system (take a look at some Pharo screenshots to get an idea)

3) Last time I checked it was planned, but there was nothing yet

My current main language for my own projects is Racket, but there are performance issues with text% and the support for parallelism is not good enough. So I guess with this respect Pharao will not be a good alternative for me either.

However, I've looked at screenshots and the default widget system seems fairly reasonable. So I'll check it out anyway.

Thanks a lot for the replies, they were helpful!

1) Last time I tried it was reasonably fast for a dynamic language - somewhat slower than javascript (V8) but faster than python (cpython) to give you a ballpark

If this is true, then it's much slower than LuaJIT, Lisp (SBCL) and probably Chez Scheme: Three great dynamic programming languages worth checking out, by the way.

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