slate gui slowness needs fixing before proceeding

[Nick Forde]

Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> Timmy Douglas wrote:
> 
>>processed by the ui fairly quickly (1 sec between typed characters
>>showing up) compared to the delay before the events registered (like
>>2-10 sec after the first keypress). But if you try inspector.slate and
>>try to drag the inspector windows you will go crazy. I guess mouse
>>motion events really drag it down or something along those lines.
> 
> It sounds like there's something rotten in the interface to SDL, rather
> than basic slowness of Slate... well, I'd be surprised if it was Slate
> since I've always been pleasantly surprised at the speed of the system
> in general. Perhaps there's something sub-par in the polling logic?

I haven't tried the SDL interface but you can get a very rough idea
of the basic VM performance by running 'make benchmark' and
comparing the results to those at: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
Last time I tried this the results were unfortunately not good :-(

The source for these tests can be found in test/benchmark and there is
some documentation in doc/benchmarks.txt.

Nick.