Re: Re : Re: Re : Road to native windows OCaml...

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 14-10-2008, Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/10/14, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>:
>> On 14-10-2008, Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 2008/10/14, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>:
>>>>
>>>> Le 14 oct. 08 à 09:59, David Allsopp a écrit :
>>>>
>> Another information, I have various benchmark on cygwin. My conclusion
>> was not what i have expected. Most of the time cygwin runtime has a good
>> speed. This is not so slow in fact. I think most of the slowness you can
>> see is because you are working in a MSDOS/emulated X terminal which
>> seems slow (but is not, this is just a question of refresh rate).
>> Seriously, cygwin is not that bad. I would still not recommend using it
>> for various other reasons.
>
> Indeed, runtime has no reason to be affected as long as it's not using
> external libraries, typically -lws2_32, winsock2). The point is really
> startup.
> As for terminal slowness, my computer boots in 16 seconds under linux.
> I recompiled my kernel yesterday and activated PRINTK_TIME/Show timing
> information on printks, it gives you the time a kernel message was
> emitted, related to startup. At the end of the boot, the kernel was
> giving times 3 seconds better than an independent chronometer. There
> had been enough things to write on the console for message to take 3
> seconds to be displayed. Displaying on a terminal is slooow
> everywhere, not just windows.
>

In fact, I cannot really prove what I say, but MSDOS shell windows seems
to refresh less frequently, giving you a strange feeling that something
is blocked. It is not a question of being slow but SEEMING to be slow.
I mean you spend the same amount of time but you get results sooner in
linux console than in MSDOS. At the end of the process, the chronometer
is at the same time, but with MSDOS you have the feeling to have spend
more time.

I think that the refresh rate of MSDOS is over 125 ms (ergonomic limit
time to feel that something is not stalled).

> Also, I don't think cygwin is bad. I just think it is not the
> appropriate answer for most of us. IMHO msys/mingw is a better
> *approach*, however their shell implementation is bastard. They
> decided to support both forward and backward slashes for instance,
> this has the awful consequence of giving you "not found" errors when
> using /c/gnu/msys/home/Adrien/icu\\source (personal experience). That
> is however something at the msys level, not the mingw one.
>

+10 points, "/" and "\\" (and " " for all OS) in pathname is a big pain.
Spend many hours debugging scripts.

Another big problem: "\n" in cygwin. For example if you use 
ocamlfind ocamlc -pp "camlp4 `ocamlfind query -a-format sexplib`" 
You are in trouble, because "\r" will pops up in the resulting command
line not being interpreted by the shell as space....

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall