a quick few questions

[Mike Stump]

On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, at 11:04  PM, Tom Lord wrote:
> Noted.  I find it hard to spot ways to say something smart about the
> "value curve" of that: how much is a 50% testing speed-up "worth",
> today?

Not much.  To back this I note that I don't think testing is any faster 
today than in years past, well, except for the fact it is on fast 
hardware.  Machines seem cheaper than any effort to speed it up.

> Wow! :-)   (Have you tried moving '/bin' to the front of your $PATH?

No, you don't understand.  grep is a tcl proc, that runs and emulates 
grep.  It is slower than using grep, because grep is compiled C code 
that has been heavily optimized for the task.  grep is (was?) used 
many, many times per testcase.  It is trivial to remove grep and use 
/bin/grep and should result in a fairly nice speedup.  proc grep only 
exists, just in case the host system doesn't have grep and to remove a 
dependency on a unixism.

I point out this, not as a single reason why it is slow, but rather as 
an example of the what the value of speed is, as measured by dejagnu.  
The answer is, speed isn't all that important.