Andreas Raab wrote on Thu, 28 Apr 2005 13:47:03 -0700
> That is most likely correct. Have a look at the current Compiler and 
> ParseNodes which were written in the ugly old days and notice how they 
> painfully avoid sending messages, and how they use pools for stuff 
> that's considered really bad style today. What has changed since the old 
> days is the general attitude - we happily pay the "price" of the extra 
> message if it gives us a bit more flexibility, if it makes the code a 
> little more easy to read. This simply didn't used to be the case "back 
> then" and MVC is one of the areas that is full of "good old code" - I 
> bet you a "modern" MVC would not perform any better or worse than Morphic.

Right. I have been using Self longer than Squeak has even existed and
keep forgetting that simple methods aren't inlined away. Someone was
even worried in another threads about adopting Traits because of the
resulting lack of direct variable accesses in the code.

Even a rewritten MVC might be a little faster since it tends to update
stuff more lazily than Morphic as it is the programmer's obligation to
make the system feel lively while in Morphic it is the system's
responsibility.

> But adding a graphics processor is a good idea and will win you *big* on 
> the small machines - most of which are bound by transfer speed over the 
> bus anyway so having graphics go fast makes a much bigger difference 
> than on the faster machines.

Having a separate video memory like most PCs might help. All my designs
have the video buffer in main memory. An interesting idea was used in
the Cyrix MediaGX (later National and now AMD Geode) - hardware
compressed video buffers. They claimed that reduced the bandwidth taken
up just displaying the video some 20 times on average. But the
coprocessor (it includes one for 2D acceleration) shares the remaining
bandwidth with the main processor.

-- Jecel
p.s.: I have just  found the number 400,000 bytecodes per second for the
Dorado on page 44 of the green book