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Message-ID:  <E34AE186-DC93-41E1-BB04-C544FE04FD53@simifilm.ch>
Date:         Sun, 2 Jan 2011 10:31:36 +0100
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de>
From: Simon Spiegel <simon@SIMIFILM.CH>
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 and engines
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <20110101230758.GA15697@khaled-laptop>
Precedence: list
Status: R

On 02.01.2011, at 00:07, Khaled Hosny wrote:

> 
> 
>> As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some
>> applications came up where the alternatives were a bad idea
>> (difference in expandability with different supported engines). So
>> this might change as we develop more code. I can only comment on
>> what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping support
>> for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses
>> pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm
>> afraid, quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the
>> ongoing changes.)
> 
> I'd be interested to know more about this slowness, my own tests shows
> that luatex 0.60 is just 1.3 to 1.6 as slower as pdftex, not that
> significant IMO, and that is testing with "stock" format, code written
> to take advantage of luatex features can be much faster than comparable
> pdftex code (in context, for example, certain operations are done tens
> of times faster in luatex than in pdftex).

Well, I guess it really depends on what you compare. I've done various tests wtih lualatex, fontspec and OpenType fonts and for me this setup is way slower than doing anything comparable with pdftex and Type1 fonts. I do of course realize that it's not fair to compare these things since they are technically completely different, but at least for me the conclusion was not to use the lualatex/fontspec/OTF combo if not absolutely needed since typesetting was so much slower. This is okay for the last run of an already finished document but for the "casual compiling" while I'm actively working on the document, it's way too slow for me. 

Simon
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Simon Spiegel
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