Meteor contest is published on benchmark games

I arranged to have the visualworks version of meteor contest published on shootout benchmark site.

This version makes Smalltalk only 7x times slower than fastest C++ version as expected, I think this time is taking image startup time into account (with -nogui).

Of course, with inclusion of optimized bit ops which are not native in VW, my stupid rotation algorithm, and some of my costly optimizations, this version of the game is also one of the longest, as long as a C++ program! That does not improve the efficiency/expressiveness score.

I must publicly thank Isaac Gouy again for his patience, since I lazily commited 3 non functional versions before taking the burden to test myself in batch mode. A shame.

Though he clearly made me understand this was becoming upsetting, he did not ban me.

My board initialization did rely on count: which is not a VW native selector.

I have first defined such selector in the 90s, and it's native in Squeak/Pharo, it is now so natural that I forgot it's not an ubiquitous standard yet.

It is provided both by Seaside (via Grease) and Smallapack (via some prereq), and of course, for some reason I had both packages installed in the image I used for testing.

That's a domain where Smalltalk sucks : when you leave your own image cocoon, implicit dependencies are killing... Another one is implicit API vs privacy, unless it's an advantage.

Being different does not necessarily means being better...

Fortunately, there are still enough advantages to compensate this poor feature.

I also accidentally removed a digit from the auto-generated optimized bit tables while trying to manually split too long lines, but saw the bug before it strikes. I generally don't care of line length, replacing tab with spaces to be tab-stop agnostic, or selecting source code output format to chunk...

I also failed to print a space before new line on even rows, and forgot the second new line after second solution. I remember I manually fixed this when I checked solution agreement 2 months ago, after all, those trailing spaces are not significant. Then I forgot...

I also failed to return a new String with ^'' in Tests class>>meteor; it thus returns self, and append an ugly 'Tests' on standard output... One thing I corrected 2 weeks ago in my Squeak version by mimetism with other benchmarks...

Of course, that's something that only happen in batch mode... As an excuse, I said to Isaac that I never launch an image from command line, nor with options, or command arguments, and that to me, it's as weird as booting a kernel with own custom flags, or booting on memtest. You generally never do that until you are forced to. But with Pharo progress on this front, I will soon have no excuse.

I also argued that my images tend to be long lived (several years or decades), because they are comfortably customized, and anything I need is generally pre-installed. To me, reconstructing an image is like re-installing a debian or an ubuntu every few days for sanity reasons, something I'm reluctant to do. I only abandon some overly hacked images where I modified too many kernel methods, and the Pharo ones because the update mechanism sucks compared to Squeak/trunk. It's normal, Pharo put the focus on reconstructing rather than updating as it is perceived as more reliable (and mainstream). Of course, Metacello and Fuel will lower the burden, but I still think it is a burden.

After downloading the tarball, digging thru the makefiles, the shell scripts, and all this mainstream stuff was not at all funny, I knew how to, but I suddenly remembered how good it was to be different finally...