At 10:31 16.03.2002 -0800, John Maloney wrote:
>Any thoughts on StarSqueak primitives that could be added to speed
>up your StarSqueakLife simulation? Perhaps a primitive to sum up
>some numeric property of the 8 adjacent cells?

Counting the number of adjacent *turtles* might be a candidate.  Currently
LifeTurtle>>neighborCount serves a slightly odd double duty:  It counts the 
surrounding turtles *and* increments a patch variable #neighbors in the 
surrounding patches.  That is so that the world (when checking for birth 
conditions) doesn't have to do the counting again.  If turtle counting was 
really fast, one could untangle that.

But then, I'd rather profile again. ;-)

The profiling that I *did* during development had pointed somewhere else 
first:  Patch variable access in general.  Going from "names are Strings in 
a Dictionary" to "names are Symbols in an IdentityDictionary" brought me a 
noticeable performance gain.  That might help the other applications too, 
but I haven't profiled or converted any.  I had posted it as an [ENH] here 
(for easy transition, it supports both styles -- worlds get to decide which 
scheme they use), though it hasn't found its way into the image.  (Ah there 
it is.  Attached again.)

Cheers,
Helge
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