On Wed, 20 Dec 2023 at 12:21, Henrik Mannerström < henrik.mannerst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> According to my very limited understanding, luatex is generally slower > than pdftex because the font loading is more involved [1,2,3,4]. In pdftex, > compilation can be sped up by precompiling a preamble to a format, which > loads much faster. To my understanding precompiled formats are not that > useful in luatex due to mixing of tex- and lua-code. [5] > > As I'm probably not the only one that writes many more short math-oriented > notes than complete books, the startup speed of luatex is an issue. I > resisted the switch from pdftex to luatex very long because of this. > > How hard would it be to make a luatex compatible precompiled format? One > that basically serialises the whole luatex state to a file and could re-use > it? Would it speed up the compilation of short documents? Is there any > plans or projects related to this? > > Best regards and season's greetings, > thank you for the wonderful tools you have brought us! > Henrik Mannerström > > [1] > https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/690903/format-dumping-using-lualatex-and-mylatexformat > [2] > https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/114742/speeding-up-compilation-using-precompiled-preamble-with-luatex > [3] > https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/75118/why-does-it-take-lualatex-so-long-to-load-fonts-and-can-i-speed-it-up > [4] > https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/234757/why-is-lualatex-so-slow-and-is-there-anything-i-can-do-about-it > [5] > https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/324559/guidelines-for-using-mylatexformat-with-luatex > It seems that only [5] refers to a recent luatex and in any case we need at least one "approved by the community" test file (i.e. not a "badly written" one) . -- luigi
