"Mark van Gulik" <ghoul6 at home.net> is widely believed to have written:

> Eric, tsk, tsk.  My Atari ST Smalltalk (circa 1988) was doing around 10,000
> bytecodes/sec on an 8 MHz Atari 1040ST with 1 MB of RAM.  Have you
> considered abandoning the concept of a VM coded entirely in C?  Much of the
> VM I constructed was coded in good ol' 68000 assembly (using inlined asm{}
> code in MegaMax C).  Instead of their pathetic switch statement I used the
> following dispatch loop...

Dear oh dear. My port of BrouHaHa runing on an 8MhzARM2 (no cache, not
even an instruction prefetch, $Mhz memory bus, no video memory) of the
same vintage was running around 80-100,000 bytecodes/sec; ie 85-90%
Dorado, somewhat dependent on the benchmark in use. And, to be honset,
the phase of the moon when the vm was compiled.
All very ordinary (sorry, Eliot) C code, run through  a not terribly
wonderful (by modern standards) compiler. Well, except for the Bitblt,
which was self compiling/annealing machine code with rapid special case
detection.

Good algorithms beat clever tricks 9 times out of 10. And in the tenth
case, you can use the clever trick to help you discover a better
algorithm.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Fractured Idiom:- COGITO EGGO SUM - I think; therefore, I am a waffle