I’m quite impressed with the native theming changes that were made in Tcl/Tk 8.5. Compare the Syscomp Design Oscilloscope under Tk 8.4 with ActiveTcl 8.5:
Nice fonts, nice widgets, better packing, and much closer to the desktop theme.
I’ve used Python’s Tk interface before for small, quick applications but have always been put off by how it [...]
Posts from ‘July, 2009’
Impressed with Tk 8.5
Funny things with slow builds
I noticed something unexpected when building GCC today. My triple core AMD desktop machine would build the compiler in 55 s but a new, decent-ish dual core laptop was taking about 200 s. The problem turned out to be the on-demand CPU governor which, due to me ‘nicing’ the build, was idling the CPU along [...]
Simulator performance #2
A bit more work on the threaded version brings us up to 54.9 million instructions/s. The interesting thing is that an average of 6.75 instructions are executed in a row before some type of branch. This seems high enough to justify a simple JIT that converts a branchless sequence into native code…
These changes however break [...]
Simulator performance
I’ve been looking at a instruction level simulator for a processor with a simple instruction set. The first version was written with an eye towards being turned into a hardware level emulator with basic instruction level timing. This lead to a simple switch based dispatch loop:
uint8_t op = pc_cache.read(pc++);
switch (op)
{
case 0: // LOADI, #0
[...]
Building dalvik by itself
Just some notes for now. After following the instructions at http://source.android.com/download you’ll have a local copy of the full android source code. We’re only interested in dalvik so we’ll skip building the rest.
First switch to the 1.5 release tag. The first version that I pulled had a typo that stopped the build. [...]
Python in deeply embedded systems
I like Python and would like to use Python everywhere. The question is, is Python suitable as a glue language on a embedded Linux system?
With a few hacks Python 1.5.2 cross compiles just fine. The speed will be acceptable so it’s really only the size that matters.
A standard build under x86 is 12.6M. [...]
The many languages of C
It’s time to buy a few more books for the library. While browsing through Amazon I came across this:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
Scroll down a page to see the 38 different covers from all around. It’s quite impressive – the low cost, orange covered Hungarian version looks like a find. My previous employeer had one of [...]