info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/26/84)
From: Mike Caplinger <mike@rice.ARPA> I really like my Macintosh, but as I use it I find myself wondering more and more why the Mac is so SLOW. I recently used an IBM PC with Turbo Pascal (I was forced) and was very impressed with its blinding compilation speed. Contrast that with MacPascal, where trying to run the program whirrs the disk for a few seconds, thinks about it some more, and then starts execution. This is just an example; all applications have some operation which takes a long time. And switching between applications is PAINFULLY slow. I don't really understand this. With a large chunk of the system in ROM and 128K of memory, I would think that programs would talk to the disk much less frequently than they seem to. I understand about resource files, purgable segments, etc, but the end result is really very slow compared to an MS-DOS or even a CP/M system. I surely don't want to go back to CP/M (and the tty user interface that implies), but is there really a reason for Macintosh programs to be such dogs starting up, closing down, and doing non-trivial computation? Is this situation ever going to change? Or do programmers just get correspondingly lazy when given a faster machine with more memory?
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/27/84)
From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA> Nobody ever said that Apple was good at designing operating systems. I've never figured out quite what the Mac spends its time doing when it launches an application, but it is reading way too much information in the wrong order. This is an OS problem - nobody ever optimized the Launch operation to minimize disk seeks (in fact it seems to have been pessimized :-), which explains slow startup and shutdown (launching the Finder again) of applications. MacPascal is slow for another reason: it's an interpreter, not a compiler. Everybody claims they can't fit a compiler into a 128K single-drive Mac, though for years compilers have been written for machines with 16K to 64K of memory and single-density 140K disks. That's right, blame it on the machine.... -------
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/27/84)
From: Piersol.pasa@XEROX.ARPA The answer is that there is no good reason for MacPascal to be slow. Other languages, particularly MacForth and the C compilers run at a blazing speed on the Mac. I suspect that the Macintosh Pascal system is a little too large to fit comfortably on a 128k Mac, and therefore does a lot of disk swaps. If you think about it, MacPascal has a pretty extensive set of library routines. This is generally considered good in a compiler, but MacPascal is interpreted, and so has to load them into memory when they are called. I'm willing to bet that this is a lot of the initial load and run time. We can hope that a compatible Pascal compiler will arrive to supplement MacPascal. Then we can hope for high speed AND development ease. Kurt
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/28/84)
From: Rick McGeer (on an aaa-60-s) <mcgeer%ucbkim@Berkeley> Is the problem in the format of an application's resource forks? Rick.