Some performance notes

[Steven Swerling]

Rob Gayvert wrote:

> Yowser. That's more than a little increase. I get very similar numbers 
> on my box for all four cases. But this is good news.  It's not often you 
> can get a 2x or 4x speedup with so little effort. For now, I'll at least 
> change my release version settings to get the 2x increase. Later, I'll 
> move over to the gcc build.
> 

Yeah. The fact that I can build the same sources with gcc and msvc, and
the gcc version is twice as fast (bytecodes/sec), that's encouraging.

In other news, I've been working on an "ImageUtilPlugin" with the goal
of getting Form<->WxBitmap and back. After that, I'm going to try to
implement a WxMorphicPanel. I've poked around a lot in Morphic and have
a pretty clear idea of how to do it on the Morphic side (famous last
words). My guess is that success will hinge on how fast I can turn Forms
into WxBitmaps. I'm cautiously optimistic, at least for Win32, because:
1) SqueakWinIntel.c already has code for using DibSections to update the
display (for wince), and thus I should be able to swipe some of that
stuff for getting a DIB section from a Form; 2) WxWidgets in MSW has a
WxDIB class that is just a windows DIB section (according to a usenet
post by the guy who wrote WxDIB). Or maybe there is a route to setting
the bits directly on the WxBitmap itself (I noticed
WxDIB::ConvertToBitmap includes the line "HBITMAP hbmp =
::CreateDIBitmap", so it looks like a WxBitmap is just a windows DDB --
so I may be able to implement a "Handler" that just calls SetDibBits on
the DDB.). Anyway, that's my current project. Let me know if you have
any thoughts on this.