I686 DOUBLE ALIGNMENT VS PERFORMANCE -Reply

[Craig Burley]

>Might we be able to find a consensus on how clock(),
>system_clock(), cpu_time() should be done on various Intel
>OS's?  The current clock() and cpu_time() give 0.010 second
>resolution on Linux and NT, but several of the timers have 1
>second resolution under Windows95.  That could make this
>benchmark run over a day trying to find repeatable timings, if it
>didn't give up.

Do you mean "...should be done on various *Microsoft* OS's"?

FWIW, there are two things I try to keep in mind whenever I panic
about how hard it might be to discover how best to code up an
interface to some obscure OS (like a Microsoft one ;-) in a
GPL'ed product:

  -  GNU Emacs

  -  Perl

My guess is that, for almost anything you need to code up portably,
you can find the best way to do it in the sources to one of those
two products.  (For hardware interface issues, the two things
would be "Linux" and "some free BSD variant".)

Haven't tried this myself yet, but if you feel like looking through
Perl sources (starting with the language, if necessary, to learn what
timer facilities it offers its users), give it a try.

        tq vm, (burley)