[OS X TeX] Textures vs. TeXShop typesetting speed

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 3 avr. 04, à 14:04, Charles Bouldin a écrit :

> The question for you, if you can still do this: Typeset the same large 
> document with Textures under classic and TeXShop. Either a TeX or a 
> LaTeX document would be fine. Tell the list the relative speeds. The 
> last time I checked (which has been well over a year) Textures was 
> -much- faster. If that is still the case, that is very strange, 
> because it means that the Textures typesetting engine running under 
> classic is faster than a native Unix TeX (teTeX).

I do not have the same perception, I have both TeXShop/teTeX-TeXLive 
and Textures installed, I do not perceive any noticeable difference in 
speed (on OS 10.3.3), or of so it would rather be in favour of TeXShop.

They're a big difference between Textures and all other implementations 
based on teTeX though:

- teTeX-TeXLive (used by TeXShop) is based on web2c, which transforms 
the original web code of TeX (web is a Pascal dialect invented by Don 
Knuth, the creator of TeX, it has nothing to see with the World Wide 
Web) to C code, and compiles this C code.

- The Textures programmers implemented the web code directly in machine 
language (they had been using commercial Pascal compilers before), so 
as to speed up compilation on the Motorola 680x0, and later they 
adapted their optimizations to the PowerPC. See 
<http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb13-3/smith.pdf>. This made 
Textures definitely faster on my SE/30 at that time.

I would have thought running this optimized code now in emulation mode 
in Classic would make it significantly slower, maybe I'm wrong.

For the record: for OzTeX, Andrew Trevorrow uses another route, he 
converts the web code of TeX to Modula-2, and uses a Modula-2 compiler, 
see his links page <http://www.trevorrow.com/links/index.html>.

Bruno Voisin
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