Is it worth delaying the release?

[bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk]

Hi Andrew,
The VM looks fine to me. More detail below.

Andrew Tween writes:
 > Hi Bryce,
 > I have built a Win32 vm.
 > Firstly, I tried building from a Squeak3.8.1-6747-full image, but that gave MNU
 > errors when generating :(.
 > So then I tried again with Squeak3.8-6665-full, and this time it generated, and
 > compiled ok.
 > 
 > 4 tests are failing in the ExuperyStoryTests...
 >       #testBlockBug3

Relies on a test from the refactoring browser.

 >       #testBlockNonLocalReturnsRecycleContexts

Another refactoring browser test is used here.

 >       #testBlocksAndProcessesBug

This one uses CommandShell which is built on top of OSProcess.

 >       #testDelayWaitStressTest

This test uses GraphViz which is used to lay out graphical inspectors
for intermediate code. This is also why I've loaded OSProcess and
CommandShell into my standard image.

I need to figure out a decent way of handling dependencies on other
packages. Exupery itself should be dependency free, but the tests are
not. I re-use tests from other packages if they catch a crash in
Exupery. This can wait though.

 > The benchmarks are...
 >     arithmaticLoopBenchmark 2487 compiled 285 ratio: 8.726
 >     bytecodeBenchmark 4271 compiled 1255 ratio: 3.403
 >     sendBenchmark 3482 compiled 1772 ratio: 1.965
 >     doLoopsBenchmark 2078 compiled 1663 ratio: 1.250
 >     largeExplorers 2224 compiled 1683 ratio: 1.321
 >     compilerBenchmark 2093 compiled 1712 ratio: 1.223
 >     Cumulative Time 12903.774 compiled 4971.489 ratio 2.596

The numbers look very good to me. The micro benchmarks are worse
than I get here and the macro benchmarks are much better.

Here's the benchmarks I get:
   arithmaticLoopBenchmark 1397 compiled 92 ratio: 15.185
   bytecodeBenchmark 2135 compiled 463 ratio: 4.611
   sendBenchmark 1576 compiled 699 ratio: 2.255
   doLoopsBenchmark 1083 compiled 841 ratio: 1.288
   largeExplorers 356 compiled 366 ratio: 0.973
   compilerBenchmark 733 compiled 708 ratio: 1.035
   Cumulative Time 4213.729 compiled 1453.554 ratio 2.899

I'm running an Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2GHz.  What CPU did you use
for those benchmarks? 

Bryce