[pdftex] Re: TeX output as Java graphic

[Laurent Siebenmann]

Jeffrey McArthur <jeffmcarthur at comcast.net> wrote:

 > The older EmTeX installations used to have a version of
 > TeX for the 8086 that ran in less than 640K of RAM. That
 > is tiny by today's standards.  It also very fast, about 3
 > to 4 times faster than the larger memory versions of TeX.

Jeffrey, 

Thanks for an interesting post.

Is the extra speed of classical emtex due to the absence of
the source code modifications needed for a *high capacity* TeX
implementation? Or is it due to assembly language optimizations
by E. Mattes?

 > TeX is small and fast.  
 > I do mean rerun and rerun and rerun.

To put TeX's speed in perspective, (Plain) TeX easily runs
10 times faster that the browsers I use.
Speed is like money in the bank; you can spend it on
just about anything you want.  

 > We are not coding in Java.  We are coding in Delphi which
 > means Windows.

And Pascal? Incidentally, the Java implementation of TeX was
once clocked 140 times slower than the C
implementation.

Laurent S.