Hi again,

sorry for being a bit late in following up to this.

Here are the results for the two runs you requested; these were done on the same machine, intermixed (the first one cache-clean, the second and third run subsequently (so that the third run is cache-filled)). I used static builds.

For the “without assert”, I get approximately 570 usec per loop consistently:
(590,580), (570,570), (560,580), (570,560)
Interestingly enough, there seems to be no preference either way (ASCII or UTF-8).

For the “without the whole if‥endif block”, I get mixed results:
(650,540), (690,530), (520,530), (650,540)
Interesting here is that the third run of them both has a lower ASCII than UTF-8 time, the others don’t – but the UTF-8 run is the second in a row, so cache might be of an issue.

Repeating the runs, I get (560,590), (540,530) for the second case,
and (760,570), (590,660) for the first case breaking its “consistently
570 usec” streak. Error of measurement may be large, thus.

Which supports your suspicion that the optimised case may not be needed at all.


Matthias asked me to provide links how to set up an Atari VM with Debian unstable and a clean/minimal unstable chroot, since there’s much use of Ubuntu here who ship ARAnyM (I even filed a Sync Request so that the latest release got a fixed version ☺).

https://wiki.debian.org/Aranym/Quick#download has got pointers for the first part (setting up an ARAnyM VM), and https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Installing contains the whole documentation (we cannot currently use d-i but people are working on it). http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/20121227/m68k-buildd.tgz is the output of “debootstrap --variant=buildd” and as such should be usable in either cowbuilder or sbuild. Considering that we *only* have unstable available, you may want to be careful when upgrading ;) but an apt-get update should work out of the box (takes a few minutes).

The VMs have 768+14 MiB RAM each in the sample configuration (maxed out), which makes them use a bit less than 1 GiB on the host side. A 3 GHz host CPU is of benefit.