Re: [Texmacs-dev] S7 branch

[Jeroen Wouters]

Hi Joris,

On Thu, 2021-11-11 at 18:37 +0100, TeXmacs wrote:
> Are there any important things that I should do to improve the S7
> branch?

Joy Yang has been working on some fixes for s7 (for example fixing
LaTeX export and a segfault) here:
https://github.com/326623/texmacs-1/commits/s7-qt5

It seems that HTML conversion is still broken in s7.

Joy has also reported excessive memory usage in s7 (>1GB for a 1 page
document):
https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs/pull/56

I haven't seen such an extreme case myself, but I do see more memory
usage. For example, after loading the user manual (Help -> Full manuals
-> User manual) in a newly started TeXmacs, I get 681.2MB in s7 versus
518.1MB in guile-1.8 and 453.5MB in guile-3.0.

I have also done a few simple benchmarks to test the speed of the
different Scheme implementations:
1) running `(benchmark-manual)` function from here:
https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs/blob/981a14ad8d0ea88031e318cd7c7e5804058580b3/TeXmacs/progs/init-texmacs-s7.scm#L510
2) running `time texmacs -q`
3) converting a large TeXmacs file to LaTeX `time texmacs -c in.tm
out.tex -q`

The findings from my limited experiment are that guile-3.0 (3.497s,
0.678s, 4.853s resp.) is currently faster than guile-1.8 (4.437s,
0.997s, 6.379s) and s7 (3.686s, 0.973s, 12.300s).

I found the slow LaTeX conversion in s7 quite surprising. Maybe there
is an underlying issue there.

I should say that for guile-3.0 to be this fast, the auto-compile
feature needs to be used (the default setting), if it is run without
(GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0) then guile-3.0 becomes the slowest of all. Auto-
compilation does mean a delay of maybe 10 to 20 seconds on the first
run of TeXmacs, though, during which TeXmacs seems to hang from the
user's point of view.

> I already noted that none of the plug-ins are recognized.  Is that
> normal?
> 

This is what I see as well.

Best wishes,
Jeroen