On Fri 24 Jan 2003 (18:00 +0100), Olivier Baur wrote:
Hello.
I'm wondering if porting gnubg to Mac OS X is currently planned or in
progress ?
If not, I'm willing to do this.
I hope my comments below don't sound too negative, consider it as a
devil's advocate sort of reply.
I've already been able to build it (from yesterday's CVS snapshot) and
run it in an X windowing system (works either with "XDarwin" or Apple's
newly released "X11" X servers). Maybe I could consider release a "full
binary download" (pre-built) version for Mac OS X users?
I'm also willing to :
- throw in multiprocessor support [as soon as I can put my hands on a
bi-proc G4 :-) ]
I've got a bad feeling that there won't be much of a gain there - it's
not a threaded application.
- port it to a full Aqua version (ie, use Apple's GUI instead of
X+GTK/Guile's)
The trouble with that is that you'd have to keep updating the porting
as features are added/changed. Unless there's some simple automation
possible or you provide a GTK->Aqua API
- add vector-computing for use with G4 processors' built-in superscalar
unit (known as "Velocity Engine" or "AltiVec") -- I have noticed that
during rollouts/evaluations, the CPU would spend 70% of its time
evaluating the neural net, which can be basically thought as a matrix
product between the different layers, which in turn is a perfect
candidate algorithm for vectorization and dramatic performance
improvement
Interesting idea - I wonder how much that might help for those who
have vector hardware.
Please keep me informed if any of these projects are already being
worked on, so I don't start working on something that's on the verge of
being completed.
Certainly within a GTK environment, any feedback on porting problems
would be very useful, as the desire is to keep the code as platform
independant (or adaptable) as possible.