[squeak-dev] squeak profiling

Riccardo Lucchese riccardo.lucchese at gmail.com
Mon Apr 21 10:39:28 UTC 2008


Dear Bert,

>  Anyway, we greatly appreciate help, in particular on the OLPC platform.
> Great to have a summer-of-code student on board! I am one of the core
> developers for the OLPC version of Etoys. We have an OLPC-specific mailing
> list at
>
>  http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/etoys
subscribed :)

>  This list here is for general Squeak topics, there's nothing too hard to
> ask, the fine folks around actually like answering tough questions (just not
> the kind of very basic "what do I have to do to execute code" type
> questions). The virtual machine hackers have their own list, as most folks
> here are quite happy not having to deal with C anymore:
It's ok, they were very nice to me :). I just stopped posting as I was trying
to understand more of squeak/etoys before giving any feedback.


>  Most optimization possibilities I see are on the Smalltalk-level anyways.
> And it's possible to get quite some speed improvements there - like what
> Ties Stuij of OLE Nepal did, who is new to Squeak, too, and already improved
> project loading time quite a bit (granted, he was "initiated" by Luke Gorrie
> who had hands-on training be me - your best bet to get up-to-speed would be
> to find a Squeak hacker near you. Where are you located?)
I live near Venice in Italy.

>  On the VM-level I see some improvement possibilities in particular in
> drawing speed. We use a generic BitBlt implementation for everything.
> Rotated bitmap display ("WarpBlt") is taking quite some time on the XO due
> to its incredibly high-resolution display. 1200x900 pixels make a lot of
> bits to push around for the little Geode CPU. Recoding the inner WarpBlt
> loop in MMX for example could gain quite a lot, also the color-format
> conversion (Squeak is 5-5-5, the X server uses 5-6-5).
My main goal is profiling Sugar and I don't think that I'll be able to work
on the st part of squeak; will see :)

I'll mail you directly (hope it's ok) and stop the noise here :)

Riccardo



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