Updated Sept 24 2008: extract from old article.

One of the more popular classes in any OO environment is the Process class. The Squeak implementation of Smalltalk even has a special OSProcess plugin to the virtual machine ( VM ) that provides 'eyeball-to-eyeball' OS level support for threads. I keep trying to come up with big XML workloads to test the limits of the stdin/stdout channels.

The best I can come up with is somewhere in the low tens of Meg/sec range, with no apparent latency. The capacity could well be 100Meg/sec on a very middling machine ( LAMP, 1.6 GHz ). In other words, objects are not only powerful conceptual constructs, but they can probably deliver good inter-process performance in most high demand environments, all based on the object model.