luatex on the garden

luatex on the garden

[Hans Hagen]

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

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           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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Re: luatex on the garden

[Pablo Rodriguez]

On 08/31/2018 10:27 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:
> [...]
> 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.

Many thanks for the new LuaTeX, Hans.

I have used for a document (http://blog.ousia.tk/0005/#context-source),
which hashes (with both SHA512 and SHA256) 38 external files.

With the previous beta, it took about 160s to completely generate the
PDF output (always with --purgeall). With the current beta, it only took
9.9s, which is a huge improvement.

I know that this might be the most favorable case for the new LuaTeX
improvements, but this is even faster than using the external binaries
that the OS (Linux64 in this case) provides.

This faster compilation could be also decreased when LuaJIT includes
bitwise operators, couldn’t it be?

Many thanks for your excellent work again,

Pablo
-- 
http://www.ousia.tk
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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: luatex on the garden

[Hans Hagen]

On 8/31/2018 8:56 PM, Pablo Rodriguez wrote:
> On 08/31/2018 10:27 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> [...]
>> 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.
> 
> Many thanks for the new LuaTeX, Hans.
> 
> I have used for a document (http://blog.ousia.tk/0005/#context-source),
> which hashes (with both SHA512 and SHA256) 38 external files.
> 
> With the previous beta, it took about 160s to completely generate the
> PDF output (always with --purgeall). With the current beta, it only took
> 9.9s, which is a huge improvement.
> I know that this might be the most favorable case for the new LuaTeX
> improvements, but this is even faster than using the external binaries
> that the OS (Linux64 in this case) provides.
> 
> This faster compilation could be also decreased when LuaJIT includes
> bitwise operators, couldn’t it be?

it's unlikely that that will happen (basically luajit stays 5.2 so 
eventualy we might have to drop it) but if you do some extensive testing 
you will notice that mkiv with luatex is not that much slower than 
luajittex on regular documents (definitely the gap is becoming less)

luajit(tex) has some built in knowledge about its bit functions so it 
can optimize them (just like math functions, which is why these 
calculating benchmarks work out so well)

in context we use bitwise operators in luatex and the bit functions when 
in luajittex (these operators are not used that frequently yet) and you 
don't want to know the details

> Many thanks for your excellent work again,
Thanks.

Hans


-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
        tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net
archive  : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________