luatex on the garden

[Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>]

Hi,

We now have a new version of luatex on the garden. This is the anual 
context meeting release which is a prelude to next years 1.10 version 
for texlive. The version number is 1.08 (as 1.09 will be out in a few 
months and mostly concerns some fixes needed for arm).

For the average user there are no real differences (luatex 1.10 will 
basically be functionality complete). Of course we use lua 5.3 (1.10 
might actually use 5.4). You can expect (depending on usage) a bit 
better performance as i wrapped some (yet) unsupported stuff into 
fallback functions.

Things to watch out for: context now uses a one-pass mp approach which 
so far worked ok (alan an i tested it in regular usage). This might 
boost performance in case where extensive mp embedding takes place.

Poppler is gone and replaced by pplib by Pawel Jakowski written for us. 
Currently he and luigi are finetuning the c code for portability. Users 
should not notice this (but it removes a dependency). More on some of 
the consequences later. It also makes the binary smaller.

The binary mode in mplib is not available in luatex. It has no real 
benefits (and is probably not used, not even by alan) apart from 
research. This removes a large dependency on foreign code (we try to 
minimlize that) and again makes the binary smaller. We might introduce 
64 bit scaled at some point (luigi will look into that next year).

There are some changes in terms of efficiency that kick in now. I only 
tested on my setup but it's probably ok. Don't expect drastic 
improvements wrr to average performsance from now on. For those on 
windows: i noticed a performance difference between the native and mingw 
binaries (with native being slower, mostly due to format saving and 
loading).

A lot of work went into this release and we hope that it's worth it. I 
will rmove some older code paths in a few weeks (less code that way) so 
then beta's will assume the new binary is used.

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
        tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl
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