From: ctm@ardi.com (Clifford T. Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Executor: Running Mac Programs on a NeXT
Date: 28 Sep 92 03:51:12 GMT
Organization: ARDI

Dear Folks,

The reason Executor runs Word and Excel better than other apps is that
they are the top selling apps for the Macintosh.  As I mentioned in my last
post, we did everything using strict cleanroom techniques.  That means we
started out by implementing all the traps as they are described in
Inside Macintosh and Tech Notes.  Now we're not perfect, and there are
bound to be bugs in our code, but the biggest reason that not all apps
run is because many apps expect behaviour that isn't prescribed by
IM+TN or don't expect behaviour that's not proscribed by IM+TN.

This means that we have to find all the things that apps may rely on but
aren't documented in the above literature.  We concentrated on Excel and
Word for two reasons; they're popularity is the overriding one, but they
were also good targets since they weren't particularly clean.  I.e. if we
can get them to go we should be able to get most stuff to go and in fact,
we're living up to that.

The reason we're on the NeXT is because I personally have a strong UNIX
background and I wanted a 68k based machine to move to after Sun discontinued
their 68k based machines.  I liked NeXT better than HP.  Interestingly
enough I've fallen in love with NeXT's even though I was quite skeptical at
first.  However, we're going to non-68k machines sometime next year which
means that

"at the very least it means Windows NT won't dominate everything..."

won't necessarily be true.  We will be porting to Windows NT and expect
Mac applications to scream under Executor on top of Windows NT on an Alpha.
Sorry to disillusion you; we're having boatloads of fun *and* we're in
it for the (boatloads of) money.

	--Cliff

=======================================================================

For those of you interested in all the numbers that Speedometer reports
I just ran a copy of 3.01 to get these.  I didn't make sure the system
was especially quiescent (cron was running for example) which may explain
why we got a 24 instead of a 26 in the CPU rating.  The Disk statistics
are kind of funky because Speedometer doesn't allow you to specify which
folder to write its scratch files in.  The directory that Speedometer
used was a NFS mounted Sun3/60 (where we did much of our work on ROMlib
and Executor).

		FPU Benchmarks

Test			    Abs.	  Rat.*
_______________________________________________
KWhetstones/sec		7499.999	11.750

Matrix Mult.(sec)	   0.450	16.111
Fast Fourier(sec)	   0.150	18.000
_______________________________________________
*A Mac II should be 1.0	      Average:  15.287


		Benchmark Mix
Test			   Abs.		  Rat.*
_______________________________________________
KWhetstones/sec		571.428		 79.211
Drystones/sec	      30612.244		 33.418
_______________________________________________
Towers (sec)		  0.300		 35.111
Quick Sort (sec)	  0.300		 28.944
Bubble Sort (sec)	  0.483		 28.207
Queens (sec)		  0.250		 32.267
Puzzle (sec)		  0.317		 33.053
Permutations (sec)	  0.500		 37.333
Fast Fourier (sec)	  7.017		 28.040
F.P. Matrix (sec)	  3.900		 27.868
Int. Matrix (sec)	  0.367		 30.182
Sieve (sec)		  0.967		 32.672
_______________________________________________
*A Mac Classic should be 1.0   Average:  35.525

    Performance Test    Mac Classic = 1.0
CPU:		24.333		Disk	9.138
Graphics:	10.690		Math	71.324
_______________________________________________
             Overall PR: 21.900

Just for yucks, here's what the Hardware Information
says:

User Name:	?????
Computer:	acintosh Plus[]15 min
CPU:		MC68040
FPU:		Integral FPU
MMU Type:	Integral MMU
Physical RAM:	3072K
Logical RAM:	3072K
ROM Version:	$0075
ROM Size:	128k

NOTE: The problem with the "Computer" is a bug in
	Speedometer 3.01.  I remember tracking this
	one down.  I think it expects certain resources
	to be present in the system file and if it doesn't
	find them it has a table of it's own that it uses
	but the strings in it are C strings instead of Pascal
	strings.  Yahoo!  I know it's fixed in a later version
	of Speedometer but I couldn't find ours and I'm in
	the process of getting Executor 1.2.1 out the door
	and don't have time to download a new one through our
	modem link to the outside world.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy