Re: anyone notice speed of 2.17.95 on Windows ?

[Mike Solomon]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 11:47 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> Mike Solomon <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> On Dec 10, 2013, at 11:27 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>>> Mike Solomon <address@hidden> writes:
>>> 
>>>> On Dec 10, 2013, at 10:36 AM, Keith OHara <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I did speed-test that patch, but under Linux.  Maybe the system
>>>>> calls to the font server, to get outlines for the glyphs, take
>>>>> longer under Windows.
>>>> 
>>>> One easy way to avoid this is to turn off this feature with
>>>> vertical-skylines = ##f for lots of grobs - I do this often for big
>>>> scores when I want to compile them fast, but I reactivate the more
>>>> accurate vertical skylines for the final version.
>>> 
>>> Sigh.  It's stuff like that which really makes me pessimistic about the
>>> prospects of LilyPond as serious software.
>>> 
>>> If its developers consider it unusable for serious work out of the box
>> 
>> It’s the opposite - I use the out of the box settings for serious work
>> - it’s the unserious playing around that I try to speed up.
> 
> How is "unserious playing around" not part of a serious creative work
> flow?
> 

It is - I misunderstood what you said.

For years, starting with Graham Percival, we’ve been kicking the around the 
idea of invoking LilyPond at various speed/beauty tradeoffs.  I am for this, 
but to date there have been no propositions that gel with the entire community. 
 I have suggested turning off all my sideline work as a default, but people 
feel this would not be the best option, so for now, we have it all, which is 
also not the best option.  I stand by Graham’s idea.

>> I’ve said on several occasions that I’m indifferent deactivating some
>> or all of vertical skylines as a default.  Several people are against
>> this deactivation (notable Janek).
> 
> If we have more than a factor of 2 in timing involved between Linux and
> Windows, then we do too much repeated processing in the font server.
> 
>> I’d be interested in gradations of UI options called perhaps:
>> 
>> \faster-but-uglier
>> \a-lot-faster-but-a-lot-uglier
>> \ridiculously-fast-and-heinously-ugly
> 
> Nope.  In this case, the answer is to cache frequently accessed
> information instead of requesting it again and again.
> 
> We don't want to give people a choice between different ways in which
> LilyPond will be bad.  We just don't want LilyPond to be bad.
> 

In my initial patches, which involved caching everything, there was no 
appreciable speed-up on Mac and Linux.  I did not test it on Windows, but I 
don’t remember Windows users (Janek) reporting back problems).

I would be interested to do rigorous testing on Windows.  It is not hard to do 
- it requires creating a Scheme hash linking glyph names to skylines.

I still advocate allowing users to specify a speed/beauty tradeoff, which can 
be done in concert with optimization to LilyPond’s core.

Cheers,
MS