Nevertheless, I would like to stress that the usage of low level libraries to speed up what needs to fast  is a correct approach in whatever language that exists, from old turbo pascal enabled an "asm" command to write directly assembly when needed to modern languages that implements their libraries in C and then use it... heck, even C libraries have parts written in assembly when needed!
I do not see why we can not gain speed in the places where is needed  through a primitive, a plugin or a FFI call.

cheers!
Esteban


On Jan 12 2022, at 6:24 pm, tesonep@gmail.com wrote:
I have activated the plugin in the build for Pharo9, it will be available in the next release. 

It will be interesting to have a Float64 extension to it. 

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 18:06 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:


On 12 Jan 2022, at 17:38, Henrik Sperre Johansen <henrik.s.johansen@veloxit.no> wrote:

True!
It���s a little bit of a naming conundrum, since the ��Float�� in Pharo is already 64-bit, but since we���re speaking ��native�� arrays,
DoubleArray
would be the best, I guess.

Speaking of, the related new (��� to me, anyways) DoubleByte/DoubleWordArray classes have incorrect definitions in Pharo 9 AFAICT- variableByte/WordSubclasses, instead of variableDoubleByte/variableDoubleWordSubclasses���


We finally fixed this in Pharo10 2 days ago: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/9792

Marcus