Opportunity for speedup

[C. Scott Ananian]

I'd suggest just uncompressing the various image files and re-timing
as a start.  The initial implementation was uncompressed, but people
complained about space usage on the emulator images (which are
uncompressed).  The current code supports both uncompressed and
compressed image formats.  For uncompressed images, putting the bits
on the screen is an mmap and memcpy, so I can't imagine any
implementation being faster than that (it's possible, of course, that
what's stealing CPU is the shell's invocation of the client program;
recoding just that little part in C should be trivial, since it does
nothing but write to a socket IIRC.)

Anyway, further benchmarking of the current implementation is probably
worthwhile before a complete reimplementation is called for.  But if
you want to reimplement it from scratch, go nuts.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )