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A project log for UBASIC And The Need For Speed

I basic, 'ubasic', they basic, we basic; wouldn't you like a speedy BASIC, too?

ziggurat29ziggurat29 06/19/2018 at 02:500 Comments

Jun-11 7:17 PM - Jun-11 9:50 PM

Initially, I described some speculative causes for 'slowness':

I asked what does 'slow' mean in this context, because there really was no baseline:  it was a bespoke project unlike any other.  It just 'felt' slow at some intuitive level.  I asked if I could have a sample BASIC program that felt slow, and that I would take a looky-loo.

The sample program happened to be an implementation of Conway's game of Life, and I was familiar with that.  They were super popular in the 70s-80s, and I had run one at least once on my actual TRS-80 back in the day, with it's screaming hot ~1.77 MHz Z-80.  And Z-80's took 4-23 clocks to do one instruction, so I would think that, yeah, a 48 MHz MIPS could probably do a little better.

Now, I had no reason to believe that the video thing I mentioned was relevant here, but I did want to point out that sometimes it's not where you think it is.  In that case, you could 'optimize' the BASIC until it took zero CPU time, and that still would not get you improvements to deal with an I/O bound bottleneck, or even a CPU bottleneck that is not where you are looking.  Believe me, I have made this mistake before.

Speculation is useful as a heuristic to formulate hypotheses, but you really need to test empirically.  Not measuring risks wasting development time chasing wild aquatic fowl, and that is itself a kind of speed optimization.

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