Re: [NTG-context] Using ConTeXt-LMTX for modern Mathematically-Literate-Programming 1/2

3 Dec 2020

      Taco,

Thanks for your comments... see below...

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 12:15:46 +0100
Taco Hoekwater  wrote:
...
...
On 3 Dec 2020, at 11:35, Stephen Gaito 
wrote:
Hans,
As I said my desktop is elderly... it has a 2.8GHz processor, 16Gb
of DDR3 memory, and a couple of old SATA1 hard disks, and only 3Mb
of CPU cache...
... all well past its use by date for single threaded ConTeXt. ;-(
So one way to get better performance for ConTeXt is to invest in a
new ultra fast processor. Which will cost a lot, and use a lot of
power which has to be cooled, which uses even more power....
Startup time can be improved quite a bit with an SSD. Even a cheap
SATA SSD is already much faster than a traditional harddisk. Doesn’t
help with longer documents, but it could be a fairly cheap upgrade.
I can’t comment on how to speed up the rest of what you are doing,
but generally multi-threading TeX typesetting jobs is so hard as to
be impossible in practise. About the only step that can be split off
is the generation of the PDF, and even there the possible gain is 
quite small (as you noticed already).
Typesetting is a compilation job, so the two main ways to speed things
along are
1) split the source into independent tasks, like in a code compiler
   that splits code over separate .c / .cpp / .m / .p etc. files,
   and then combine the results (using e.g. mutool)
This is basically my approach... *However*, while the dependency graph
for a standard compilation has been engineered to be an acyclic tree,
for a ConTeXt "compilation", the "*.tex" file has a cyclic dependency
on the (generated) "*.tuc" file.

Basically my parallelization "build manager" has to unroll or other
wise reimplement the mtx-context.lua 

```
  for currentrun=1,maxnofruns do
    ...
  end
```

loop until the `multipass_changed(oldhash,newhash)` returns `false`.

Followed by a "pdf-linking" stage (possibly implemented, as you suggest,
by `mutool`) ....

Not great.... but it might work... (and I am willing to give it a
try)...
...
2) precompile recurring stuff (in TeX, that would mean embedding
   separately generated pdfs or images)
Best wishes,
Taco
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