Am 19.01.24 um 10:31 schrieb Hans Hagen:
(that said: luametatex runs fine on my mobile phone)
What’s the smallest/oldest device someone tried LMTX on? (We were joking about “Hans’ thermostate and Alan’s fridge“…) Would it run on some 8 bit homecomputer? (I’d guess the RAM is too limited, and loading from datasette would need hours…)
Just curious. The smallest i have here is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802 which actually was a very nicely designed thing (also powers the hubble); processors never became cleaner. Now, as the kit I used only had 512 bytes ram (later 2K or so) it really learns one how to program efficiently (thihk of writing a simple game, save and load from cassette
On 1/19/2024 11:00 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote: player, etc in that space; dynamic adaptive functions and such) and you know where I'm coming from'(later pascal and modula). That said: luametatex has a smaller memory footprint than luatex although nodes are way bigger but even that won't make it run well on an 8 bit processor, assuming it can address 32 bit mem. Context mkii started on 4.7 Mhz intel (386) so now we're 1000 times faster but performance gain is not linear. After all, tex has to compete with other applications running at the same time (browsers, remote clients, media apps, web polling apps, zoom, etc.) so it's kin dof amazing that it actually performs okay. What boosted performance is for instance ssd's. What might boost is ddr5 memory but that has to catch up with ddr4 first. What also boosted luametatex is cpu cache. I remember when taco and I moved to the math part we noticed a drop in performance, until machines got updated with larger cache. We'd just crossed some magic threshold. Actually, I kind of assume that we're stuck with cpu performance but nevertheless luametatex became faster. It helps to develop on an older machine and not on a yearly updated one as that obscures matters. (Not that I'd not like a faster machine, but that comes at a steep price.) Hans ps. In the tranmsition from pdftex to luatex to luametatex one should not underestimate Taco's effort of going from basically unreadable and useless C output by web2c (pascal -> c) to what became the luatex C code base (with embedded original documentation). From that we added more functionality gradually over a decade till luametatex spun off, which then lead to quite a bit of refactoring again (but trying to maintain the spirit of how tex is programmed). ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------