jSuneido Milestone

I just fixed the last two failing stdlib tests. Now all the tests pass except, of course, for the ones that requires the language (rules and triggers).

One of the bugs was a couple of lines of code I'd somehow omitted during porting.

The other was using 0x2f as a bit mask instead of 0x3f. Oops. The "funny" part was that this was in the code for handling minutes and seconds in date/times so it would cause intermittent failures depending on the exact time when you ran the test. It got down to the point where I was getting 7 and I should have been getting 23. The difference is 16, one bit. Aha! The C++ code was correct so I could have found it by comparison, but for some reason my eyes didn't pick up on the one character difference.

I guess this is a pretty big milestone for this project. For some reason it doesn't feel like it. Too gradual, too much more to do.

I hadn't done any speed benchmarks up till now. For a quick comparison, it took 11 seconds to run the stdlib tests with jSuneido and 5 seconds with cSuneido. That's not a scientific or fair test, but I'm happy enough with the result. Considering I haven't done any optimization, or even worried about speed at all, it doesn't seem too bad. And this is just running jSuneido from within Eclipse. Presumably the server Java VM would be better since it does more optimization. And it's also crossing from Windows to OS X through Parallels which may add some overhead.

I've always been ready to accept a speed penalty for the Java version, as long as it was more than made up for by multi-threading on multiple cpus/cores. e.g. If it's 25% slower, but you can use 4 cores, you still end up 3.5 times faster overall. Of course, you don't achieve an N times speedup from N cpus because of locking etc.

It would have been nice if there was an in-house app that I could switch to jSuneido. But our main apps require rules and triggers. Maybe our version control server - I don't think it uses any rules or triggers. That's a little scary, though. It's a pretty critical component. Especially since we generate the automatic nightly updates for our clients directly from version control. Might be wise to do a bit more testing first :-) I'm sure my staff would agree!