On 1/18/2024 7:56 PM, Shiv Shankar Dayal wrote:
In comparison to LaTeX with LuaHBTeX, ConTeXt with LuaMetaTeX is
lightning fast.
pdfTeX is 8bit, and Knuth’s plain TeX is very low level – for a fairer
comparison, try the TeXbook on LuaMetaTeX (I don’t know if “plain”
works
though).
I understand that why it is slow, but the problem is that the difference
is too high.
My book has lots of math, so perhaps that is the reason.
You can run the texbook with \tracingall and see what actually happens.
The texbook uses plain tex (very lightweight) with a dedicated style
(also lightweight). On the contrary context uses layers of abstraction,
a more complex font, math, structure, page etc etc etc sytstem.
In fact, plain tex had to be as it is because otherwise it would take
ages to process teh texbook. On a pc one could see the page numbers
crawl so in the end wr're quite okay nowadays.
If you run context with \tracingall you'll see that more goes on.
For me 40 pps sounds not that bad. If you use only text you can get to
500 pps but that's not realistic. Maybe your style is suboptimal.
Also, open type fonts, opentype math, unicode, color, etc etc comes at a
price. And, compared to pdftex, in most cases luametatex is faster on
documents of average complexity. If you also use xml and/or metapost you
migh tbe dragged down to a few pages per second while lmtx doesn't
suffer much.
Anyway, if you think it can be made faster you can always post code to
this list that identifies bottlenecks.
Of course we'll never be as fast as (pure) plain tex (no layers added)
or latex (which often is advocated as faster than context).
Hans
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