Re: [MacPerl] MacPERL Performace vs. Intel Class systems

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

You all have correctly identified file system performance as the bottleneck.

D.Thomas@vthrc.uq.edu.au (Danny Thomas) writes:
>"Paul J. Schinder" <schinder@pjstoaster.pg.md.us> writes
>>In 6 or so months, we can all upgrade what machines we can to Rhapsody and
>>lose the file system bottleneck.  Until then, there's little to be done.

Maybe not in this script, but in scripts that have a somewhat better balance
between computation and I/O, there are theoretical possibilities to speed up
MacPerl (through asynchronous writes), but I won't pursue them in the near
future.

>to drift further off the topic of this list, I seem to remember reading
>that Frontier was going to be ported to Rhapsody (being an app it's easier
>than AppleScript)

I don't think that makes that much of a difference.

>but I'd like to see Rhapsody include Perl as one of the standard scripting
>languages.

I don't have any inside knowledge here, but Perl will probably work just fine
on Rhapsody.

>I think Matthias said that the two big
>problems using MacPerl as a scripting language are:
>  1) it's use of memory

Effectively a non-issue with a good VM subsystem, i.e. Rhapsody.

>  2) single-threaded nature

Effectively a non-issue with a good process scheduling subsystem,
i.e. Rhapsody. 

>I'm guessing that by the time of the unified Rhapsody release in a year or
>so, that perl will include multi-threading (slated for perl 5.006).

I guess so, but I also think you're missing the point here. People probably
overestimate how much they want threads. Primarily, they want multiple scripts
in the same language, executing concurrently. On MacOS, threads have big
advantages providing that, so threading is the way to go. On Rhapsody,
processes are much more affordable than on MacOS, so prcoesses (without any
threading support in perl) will do the job just fine. Threads will be useful
for applications such as internet servers, but not as widely as you might
think.

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
  "If people are boasting that they use the best tools, you can figure that 
   they can't find any competitive advantage to using those tools, or else
   they wouldn't be presenting them as a competitive advantage." -- Dave Winer


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