Philippe Deschamp (Philippe.Deschamp@INRIA.Fr) wrote:
> Robert Harley wrote:
> > The Windows-aware ports had a few small increments up to 1.1.3. The
> > differences were some user interface issues, small speed improvements...
>
>I wouldn't label as "small" the modifications which allow my machine to rate
>a splendid 104ki/s [...]
Sure, there were several small improvements which together added up to
quite a reasonable speed-up. They include getting alignment of MMX
quantities right, replacing structs with lots of pointers, compiling
with Visual C++, writing some parts with VC's inline ASM and so on.
The Unix version already aligns MMX things correctly, and the VC
changes won't help unless you can convince Microsoft to port their
compiler! =:-)
Some speed might be gained by using pointers a lot and/or writing
chunks in assembly language. That would require forking off and
maintaining another version, because it wouldn't fit in well with the
clean, portable Unix code we have now. I don't feel that the loss of
simplicity and elegance would be worth it. Introducing MMX in the
first place caused some loss but the speed-up was huge: +100% or so.
Bye,
Rob.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 28 2000 - 17:16:26 MET