On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 05:38:17PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote: > I'm thinking of trying Scribble again now that I have a new computer. > I found it unacceptably slow years ago when I tried it on a 80,000 word novel. > I now, however, have a modern machine and it may be fast enough.
A theory why scribble is slow: I looked at the scribble installed on my computer (which runs Devuan, a Debian derivative) and discovered that it's all Racket source code. So my guess is that Racket is interpreting Scribble, and the the already interpreted Scribble is interpreting the scribble input. Stacking interpreters is usually a recipe for sloth. So ... is this likely the reason? Processing an 800,000 character text file without any at signs (so that I don't invoke any fancy scribble features) took six minutes on a modern laptop with 16 gigabytes of RAM. Hand-coded C processed the same file faster than I can blink my eye. Both systems produced usable HTML. (but the hand-coded C is limited as to what it will do. It won't handle tables of category-theoretic diagrams, for example, and maybe Scribble can someday manage to do all this) If this is the reason for scribble being slow, what can be done about it? Can it, for example, be compiled to something more like machine code? (I'm using a 64-bit intel processor.) -- hendrik -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/20190716000646.lcdckfcd7i6rk4f3%40topoi.pooq.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
