Tim,

> On Jan 2, 2021, at 10:29 AM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
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> 
> 
>> On 2021-01-02, at 12:20 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> I’m sorry but it’s completely unacceptable.  
> 
> This is for deciding what options to have the welcome to your new image wizard suggest, right? In *that context* a single frame cycle delay spent being helpful to a new user seems very reasonable.
> 
> Now, in an image set up to be used within some scripty-command-line-doit, absolutely not. I'm fairly sure nobody was suggesting that. If there is a problem where the wizard is getting invoked at an annoying time (for example, your scripts for building a vmmaker image) then ther must be a decent way to make it skip the whole thing. Might it be appropriate to say that if any commandline input is provided then the wizard stage is skipped completely?

We’re talking at cross purposes.  The Wizard is but one client of isSlowMachine (or whatever the selector is).  If it’s a generally useful facility (and it’s been there for 40 years so maybe it is) then it is present in *every* context.  And in many contexts adding 20ms to startup, let alone 150, is too slow.

At DarkPlace at the turn of the C or so we got start time down to around 80ms after it being in the 400ms range of the machines of the time.  Machines are much faster now.

In a typical OpenSmalltalk-vm repository clone there are about 10,000 .c files (not .h, .cc, .m etc; just .c files).

On my 2.9GHz MBP doing
     find . -name ‘*.c’ >/dev/null
takes 1 second.  Doing 
     find . -name ‘*.c’ -exec grep NOTTHERE \{} \; >/dev/null
takes 28 seconds.

Adding 20ms to the startup time of grep would add 200 seconds, a 700% overhead.  20ms is unacceptable if it’s unnecessary.

> 
> 
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Useful Latin Phrases:- Vescere bracis meis. = Eat my shorts.
> 
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