peformance of Allegro 4.0 Beta CLOS on Sparc

[Joseph.Bates@WIZARD.OZ.CS.CMU.EDU]

I tried running the 4.0 Beta release of Allegro on a Sparc
over the weekend.  I wanted to compare the performance of
the new native CLOS with that of PCL in Allegro on my PMAX.

The new CLOS on the Sparc did make-instance on simple classes
10 times faster than PCL on the PMAX.  Class definitions were
"much" faster also, I'd guess 3-5 times faster, though I didn't
time it.  The whole Oz system, which is heavily CLOS based,
seemed to run about twice as fast on the SPARC, though again
I didn't time it.

I had wanted to get a general sense of the speedups that might
be in store with the new CLOS, and all in all I was very impressed.
I am greatly looking forward to running the new Allegro on my 
collection of PMAXen, when that system is available for beta use.

[By the way: If this new system comes with a profiler, that would
be a great help, too.  If it is very expensive, perhaps we could
get it for one or two machines of each type of architecture and 
share use.]

Joe