I'm going to be focusing more on performance over the next couple of months as I wrap up Mini Micro. To that end, I want to build a nice collection of benchmark programs — programs designed to push the virtual machine to its limits, so we can measure its performance.
I'd love some help with suggestions of benchmark tasks, or even better, actual code! These will fall into two categories:
- Generic MiniScript code that could run in any environment (command-line, Mini Micro, etc.)
- Code specific to Mini Micro that can include graphics operations, etc.
An example of the first would be some sort of mathematical benchmark that calculates digits of pi or finds prime numbers, or string-processing benchmarks like finding all occurrences of "the" in a block of text. The second sort might be things like flood-filling a region of pixels on the screen, animating large numbers of sprites, or updating tiles in a tile display.
Both types of code are very welcome. Please take a few minutes to dream up these sorts of tasks, and maybe even bang out a bit of code. You'll be helping to make MiniScript and Mini Micro the best they can be!
