Hans Hagen
ps. At bachotex some folks told me that the perception is that luatex is slow. Apart from the expected lower speed due to 32 bit character handling and wide fonts, my impression is that (at least for context) we now run quite okay. Given that we do more complex things (not talking fonts now) mkiv runs faster than mkii or at least comes pretty close. My personal aim is that a edit-test cycle of a couple of pages should stay below .5 sec (all included). When I get 20-50 pages per second on average complex documents on my current laptop I'm fine.
ps. I just read in tugboat that the texbook on DEK's 3.2G xeon driven machine needs .3 seconds which is on such hardware twice the time context needs to produce a zero page document.
The per-page costs of tex.tex (the version generated by weave tex.web) are likely even less: it's just doing what TeX does well. "Modern" formats are really turning the Pascal/macro ratio on its head. The kind of mess the inputenc/fontenc combination alone does makes \tracingall almost unreadable. -- David Kastrup