On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, Colin Burchall wrote:
> >well... the trick isn't to use assembler, rather plain c or something
> >like that. it would rather hard to maintain a prog as complex as a
> >browser written in assembly. would not fit in with their
> >multi-platform philosophy, either...
>
> I didn't say write it entirely in assembler - you're right, that would be
> very hard to do. A main procedure written in the high level language of
> choice that calls lots of machine code subs is the best way (IMO) to write
> efficient apps. Compiled C doesn't have a hope of running as fast or in as
> little memory as the same task written in assembler.
Yes, but the value in writing code in assembler is very low these days,
unless it is for a routine such as an image processing kernel which needs
to be called several million times. This is not really the case in
Netscape.
In the good old days you could easily argue that directly accessing the
video memory with a nice tight hand optimised assembler loop would be the
way forward, unfortunately in these modern times of window systems and
protected memory you can't do this.
The bottlenecks in a web browser are primarily the Net (obviously),
followed by the window systems rendering code. The trick is to use the
window system as efficiently as possible.
> As for cross platform compatibility, you do have to sacrifice that for the
> ultimate in efficiency. I think the Netscape project was based on x86
> architecture (what else is there, after all??).
I am currently running netscape on a Sun SPARCstation...
(I'll stop now)...
--
Tom Wheeley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
research scientist, sowerby research centre, british aerospace
direct line, tel: 0117 936 8471. fax: 0117 936 3733 (confirm)
"Trying is the first step towards failure" -- Homer J. Simpson
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