Don't believe the hype: VB and ST

Don't believe the hype: VB and ST

[Paul Pukite]

EE Times, March 13, 1995 article by Alexander Wolfe about engineering 
CAD tools and Visual Basic:

``Nevertheless, Visual Basic has several negatives. Most notable,
  ease of use comes at the expense of speed and size. "VB is very
  resource-consumptive," said Escalades's Hsueh. "The resource 
  issue prevents us from doing major engineering products with
  just VB tools."
    Another drawback is apparent when attempting to debug Visual 
  Basic programs.  According to R-Active Concepts' Drusinsky,
  "It's very difficult to get a bird's eye view of what the overall 
  code structure is."  That's because VB is event-driven, there's 
  little explicit order to the code it generates, and it's hard to
  view sub-procedures.''  
                    -- These two guys sell VB-based tools, no less!
  

Clent/Server Today, March 95 review of a Smalltalk development system:

``Once we were able to load the product, we noticed the same 
  variability when it came to loading just the Smalltalk image. The
  product on our test system took anywhere from 1:15 seconds to over
  four minutes to load each time. Loading the visual development
  environment took another minute or two.
    The performance problem with VisualAge comes from its sheer size. 
  IBM sets the minimum system configuration for VisualAge as a 25-MHz
  486 processor with 16MB of RAM; 24MB is recommended. Its Smalltalk
  image file is just over 7MB large, and when you add all the DLLs 
  and other items it uses, you begin to hit serious performance 
  problems on a 16 MB system.
    While working with VisualAge, it was not uncommon for the system 
  to freeze while VisualAge worked with its own swap-file. At times
  our drive would spin for up to seven minutes while VisualAge worked.
    What we found very surprising is the fact that IBM recommends 
  disabling the use of Windows for Workgroups networking because 
  it takes up too much memory on 16 MB systems, which poses a serious 
  problem to those working off a file server. Moreover, it also 
  defeats the purpose of developing client/server applications. The
  real shock comes when you attempt to deploy Visual Age applications
  on client platforms. Your users will need to have at least 12MB of
  RAM to deploy runtime applications.
    Our simple to-do application stores entries from a text box in an 
  ordered list and then displays them in a list box from which the 
  entries can be removed or more added. This unadorned application 
  generated a runtime module of nearly 7MB. That's because any VisualAge
  application needs almost the entire VisualAge runtime image.''

             -- And we always thought that Ada had an "image" problem!