[OzTeX] OzTeX on MacIntel

Andrew Trevorrow andrew at trevorrow.com
Thu Feb 23 00:53:02 CET 2006


>                   OzTeX        latex
> Dual 1.8GHz G5     13.8         5.7
> 2GHz Intel iMac    19.2         3.4

Interesting figures, and not all that surprising.  I suspect most of the
difference is due to disk i/o -- OzTeX's file searching algorithm is not
as sophisticated as teTeX's, so if you have very long search lists for
input_folders, tfm_folders, etc., then OzTeX starts to struggle.
Of course, you can always call teTeX's latex from OzTeX!

And before anybody asks... No, there won't be a universal binary version
of OzTeX.  OzTeX is written in Modula-2 under MPW.  Apple, to their shame,
decided not to Carbonize MPW, so it requires Classic to run on OS X, but
there will be no Classic on MacIntel boxes.  There's no way I'm going to
rewrite OzTeX from scratch so I guess the end is nigh.

Andrew

PS. The switch to Intel and the demise of MPW means I have to re-tool.
For the last 8 months I've been learning wxWidgets (www.wxwidgets.org)
by writing a sophisticated Life app in collaboration with Tom Rokicki
(of dvips fame).  Visit http://golly.sourceforge.net/ for details.



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