[tex-live] Comments on asy in the x86_64 2017 pretest binary

[Ken Moffat]

When I posted a couple of days ago about my problem with lua in 2017
source (caused by gcc-7.1), I mentioned that I might comment more on
the binary asy if I managed to rebuild it (and the main texlive) from
source.

The reason is that 3D drawing/diagrams in asy seems exceptionally
slow in the binary.

Using the attached file (it produces a pink cylinder - not very
exciting) I run:

pdflatex cylinder.tex
asy -V cylinder-*.asy
pdflatex cylinder.tex
pdflatex cylinder.tex

At the moment I'm on an intel haswell i7 ticking along at about 3.6
GHz.  With the binary, and my Makefile to run those commands as
'make cylinder', it takes between 47 and 48 seconds.  With the
self-compiled version of asymptote it takes just over 13 seconds.

2D drawing does not seem to be impacted.  I see that my own build
of asymptote used the following flags in g++ : -Wall -DHAVE_CONFIG_H
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -DUSEGC  -pthread -DFFTWPP_SINGLE_THREAD
-std=c++11 -g -O3 -fno-var-tracking

Also, I throw a lot of system deps at this: gc, fftw, gsl, freeglut,
even libsigsegv.  I then rebuild Python so it can pick up tk, then
build its Imaging module - but from memory that only lets me try to
use xasy, and like so many things I have not yet acquired the knack
of doing anything useful with that.

But although the extra asymptote deps are clearly not essential, it
does seem to run a lot faster if they are present.  Perhaps they
might be reconsidered if texlive moves to a newer c++ standard for
2018 ?

ĸen
-- 
I live in a city. I know sparrows from starlings.  After that
everything is a duck as far as I'm concerned.  -- Monstrous Regiment
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