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Closed 10 years ago.
As far as I understand it (a few days of research here and there), there are two major TeX engines: pdfTeX and XeTeX. pdfTeX is the "standard", having been around since the early 1990s, renders straight to PDF, and improves on some minor formatting issues with original TeX.
XeTeX, on the other hand, also outputs PDF, can use any system font without complication, and can accept Unicode input by default. And yet for some reason it's not the default engine in any of the TeX distributions.
Do I have this right? Why is pdfTeX still the standard? Which do you use?
Xetex has many plusses when it gets to advanced font techniques on the ligature and character level (as well as a simple interface to use otf fonts) but on the other hand it has drawbacks when it gets to micro-typography on the page level. That is, in Pdftex (or Pdflatex), it is possible to use the microtype package which gives you a nicer margin and some other features concerning letter kerning and spacing.
Generally, most users of Tex/Latex won’t care much about these features anyway (and well, you can see that in the documents they produce); therefore I think neither side seems to have significantly more momentum; and therefore the standard settings are likely to stay the way they are.
(Until in an undefined number of years someone is able to and actually does merge these features…)
I use whatever texlive releases and Debian / Ubuntu package for my respective systems :) It seems there is a texlive-xetex package but I haven't used that yet.
More seriously, (La)TeX is now a standard and these things do not change overnight. And I am quite frankly quite happy with pdftex --- in no small measure because it can render latex files I have written over two decades (modulo the latex2e change of yore).
MacOs User -- I enable XeTex in TeXShop -- it's in the preferences. Sometimes I use XeLaTeX.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
If so, what is the storage and memory footprint?
EDIT
I had done some research about this, but failed to find useful information. The site http://www.erlang-embedded.com/ doesn't help at all. The blog article http://www.1011ltd.com/web/blog/post/embedded_erlang was a little helpful, but It would be nice to hear answers from people with more experience.
EDIT 2
The hardware that I intend to use for Erlang has 32Mb of FLASH storage for the system and 512Mb of RAM. It is dual core with 400Mhz per core. It runs Linux version 2.6.18.
EDIT 3
The motivation behind my interest in Erlang would be to solve gracefully concurrency problems. On the project that I work we have some complex middleware software that is not robust, it's hard to understand and hard to extend. Of course, you can write great concurrent software in C, but Erlang just seems like a better tool for this problem domain.
What is embedded for you?
In my world it's a system with less than 1MB Flash and typically ~64kB Ram.
In my world exists C and sometimes also C++ compilers.
But nobody heard ever for an erlang compiler for such a system (and nobody missed them).
But if embedded is for you WindowsCE or a linux running on a non PC basis hardware with > 64MB Ram and 1GB Flash,
then there should be no problem with erlang.
I would echo the sentiment that the question is vague. But, ...
Not trying to troll, but I think the answer is either "Yes!!" or "No!!" depending on your assumptions regarding hardware and what problems your are trying to solve that aren't easily solved by something more standard like C (i.e., why aren't you using something like C, there must be a reason... reducing code-size, need hot-upgrade, {erlang_value_prop, n}, etc.).
Under a certain set of criteria, the answer seems to be "yes". Evidence includes:
EMBEDDED ERLANG? ABSOLUTELY (http://www.1011ltd.com/web/blog/post/embedded_erlang)
Its embedded use in ATM switches and other telecom equipment
There is (or was) an embedded-Erlang group on Google
I think Ulf Wiger has an Embedded Erlang slide-deck as part of his work with Erlang Solutions
etc
No,
Many embedded systems don't have Erlang compilers, while all have C compilers and most have C++.
Erlang lacks the low level access required by an embedded system.
Its certainly possible to get Erlang on a cluster of Raspberry Pis, but this isn't an embedded device.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I recently switched to a Mac. I am trying to choose between Textmate 1.5 and Sublime Text 2 for Ruby on Rails development. I know these editors have a great deal in common from my own testing. I don't however see many differences as of yet. If you have experiance with both, can you please make a list of the differences between the two?
Please make any list without subjective comments as I'm not looking to start a flame war; only factual differences. There are many resources that list similarities -- please focus on the differences.
Thank you.
I come form Vim and try both TextMate 2 and Sublime Text 2 for a while. I like them both, but for different reasons.
I'm pretty sure you can make TextMate 2 act almost like Sublime Text 2 by plugins and setting, or vice versa. And they both have tons of gorgeous themes/plugins/snippets. So I just try to list the 'out of box' and potentials difference between them.
TM2:
Open source
Fine integrate with rails just out of box.
Switching between files with hotkey follow rails conventions.
Can move project list to the left.
Install plugin and adjust setting by GUI.
Run rails test in text editor out of box.
More build-in wrapping features.
Complete word by [esc] and add snippet by [Tab]
ST2:
Cross plateform
Ability to imitate some Vim behaviors.
Adjust setting by editing a json file. Less intuitive for GUI user, but can source control and transfer it easily.
Switching between files by Ctrl-P out of box.
Complete word and add snippet all by [Tab]
A 3rd party nice package manager.
Please correct me if any error or missing stuffs. And I think the best way is try them both for couple weeks, know the possibility and tune one of them upon your favorite work flow.
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Closed 11 years ago.
Can anyone suggest me a good latex editor (GUI) for RedHat LInux. I have tex installed on my machine which is fine for compiling documents in command line mode, but without a GUI editor (with code completion facility) it is really difficult to draft a new tex document.
I have looked at Kile and I am not able to install it on my Redhat machine despite repeated attempts. Also two of the most popular GUI latex editors - Texnic center and Led don't have Linux versions :-(
Have you tried Texmaker? From what I see here it should be available into the RH repositories.
How about emacs with YaTeX mode though it's not a GUI for LaTeX? YaTeX provides a completion functionality for TeX commands. Emacs also has the dynamic abbreviation functionality (bound to Meta-/ key sequence by default) for any word in your text file. You can also customize emacs to invoke shell commands. Unless you definitely want to click a button to compile a LaTeX document, I think this may be a good option.
YaTeX Web site
http://www.yatex.org/
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According to the computer language benchmark game, the LuaJIT implementation seems to beat every other JIT-ed dynamic language (V8, Tracemonkey, PLT Scheme, Erlang HIPE) by an order of magnitude.
I know that these benchmarks are not representative (as they say: "Which programming language implementations have the fastest benchmark programs?"), but this is still really impressive.
In practice, is it really the case? Someone have tested that Lua implementation?
There's a good discussion at Lambda the Ultimate. LuaJIT is very good.
Many people have reported impressive speedups on lua-l (the lua mailing list). The speedups are most impressive for pure Lua code; the trace compiler is not as effective when there are lots of calls to C functions in loadable library modules.
In my case (a game prototype development), I observed no performance improvement at all. I use lua for embedding, so there are lots of calls to C++ library functions. Even though main loop is in a lua script and all of the important logic is implemented in lua, the overall performance was determined by rendering engines and physics engines implemented in C++.
The original lua is already fast enough for such applications.
I made an experiment with the lesson learned here: http://www.sampalib.org/luajit2.0_tunning.html
Some data are not that valid anymore ( maxmcode=1024 is enough ), but luajit brings a robust improvement on a 600 lines of code pure Lua script (no C call to hit perfs...) that is not a large scale application nor an embedded use case but much more than the benchmarks.
The performance of JIT depends on two things: performance of original scripting language, and the performance of the compiler.
Compiler is a pretty mature technique and most JIT compiler have comparable performance. However, lua itself, i.e. lua-without-JIT, is probably one of the fastest scripting language.
lua is faster than Java-without-JIT.
lua is faster than Javascript-without-JIT.
lua is faster than most-scripting-languages-without-JIT.
so,
lua-JIT is faster than Java-with-JIT (the sun Java),
lua-JIT is faster than V8 (Javascript-with-JIT),
etc, ...
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm interested in studying how an interpreter works, and LOLCODE makes me laugh, so: What's the best OpenSource LOLCODE interpeter? Bonus points for providing a decent REPL.
Depends on your favorite/"best-to-understand" language - for example, here's a Java and a Perl open source interpreter.
My favorite implementation is LOLPython
So, great plus if you're a python fan. :)
And if you wanted to make changes to what's already defined, it's pretty simple. :D
While maybe not the "best" one, I think it's pretty cool that someone from DLR team actually created a LOLCode interpreter based on the DLR, with full access to the .NET Framework.
Added Link from Wayback Machine
Certainly without a definition of "best", there's little way to answer this question with any certainty. I'm writing an LOLCODE interpreter (http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/) to support LOLCODE as a language for writing stored procedures in the PostgreSQL database. (Why, you ask? Because I wanted to learn how.) This interpreter is written in C, and uses Bison and Flex for parsing. These seem to be "best" choices in this case because that's what PostgreSQL itself uses. If you're more familiar with, say, Perl, the Perl-based interpreter is probably better.
I know it's not an interpreter, but I've used the Lolcode.net implementation, and it worked rather well for me. It follows the specifications relatively well, except for a few things (like arrays).
Also, I got it to run in Linux using Mono, if Linux compatibility is important to you.