slate gui slowness needs fixing before proceeding

[Brian Rice]

On Jun 12, 2006, at 5:27 AM, Nick Forde wrote:
> 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 :-(

*ahem* Just to be pedantic, that's not the VM's performance, that's  
the VM+image's performance. There are a lot of message sends that  
happen for basic control-flow operations, for example, or even for  
just executing a non-literal (argument to a method) block.

That said, the VM design is rather naive and could be much better,  
but not by the order of magnitude that the shootout benchmarks are.  
The performance problem we have relates to the Strongtalk design - we  
just have no inlining compiler to rely on.

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

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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