Re: Progress Update

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf wrote:

>I just felt that discussing THE most optimized algorithm for such a
>relatively unimportant part of the system is the kind of thing that
>makes projects of the scope of PenguinPlay bog down. Heck, regular Unix
>ufs uses a darn ARRAY for directories entries!

And because that is too slow in many case modern file systems (reiserfs,
ext3 and AFAIK also xfs) use trees for that. We can't optimize much in the
area of file reading, but we can do *much* in the area of file opening -
and considering that many games operate with hundreds to thousands of small
files the speed gain from this isn't as little as it may seem.

>that they were the best machines and environments ever conceived. Don't
>get pedantic with that last 10% of work, Unix is *FINE* without it, see?

No ;)
There are several parts in Un*x etc where it's just "good enough" instead of
"as good as possible". And from time to time these pieces hurt (Ever
wondered about the bad performance of NFS and telnet? Ever wondered why it
is so hard to do graphics on the console?)
"Just making it work" is almost always bad, planning a bit more to "make it
work fine" is often good, but sometimes "doing it properly" is the right
way.

>Where does PenguinPlay want to be? On all the Linux machines? Or in the
>garbage dump?

On all Linux, Windows, Irix, BeOs and Mac machines. At the very
least. And for that to archieve it has to be good.
And PenguinFile is now only about one week from the "debugging and
polishing" phase.


	Christian
-- 

Drive A: not responding...Formatting C: instead