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

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 24 May 2017 at 05:28, Ken Moffat wrote:
> 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.

I have an ancient 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo.

I tested with i386-darwin binary that was statically compiled on 10.6
with gcc 4.2 against the latest version of gsl and fftw + system
OpenGL.
It took 2 min 50 s.

I repeated the experiment with x86_64 binary that was compiled with
clang against lots of shared libraries provided by the MacPorts
package manager (readline, fftw-3, gsl, libsigsegv, ncurses, boehmgc
among others) and it took 53 s to complete. So a factor of 3+ in my
case as well, but I should be able to do more tests (comparing which
factor causes these delays exactly).

Mojca