[plt-scheme] another game: pacman

On Aug 18, 2006, at 7:43 AM, Nikolay Artamonov wrote:

> I tested pacman game and can't understand "a few random pauses",
> that was mentioned by Noel. My PC has PIV-1,6 Ghz with 512 Mb RAM +
> Win 2k3. And every 3-4 seconds game becomes "frozen" for nearly 1
> second and game process continues. Then after 3-4 seconds game
> again suspends and then again continues. Ans so on.

If you are running the program in the DrScheme environment you might get better
results by setting the 'No debuggin and profiling' option under
Language->Choose Language menu.

But... First let me say that I really like PLT Scheme, it seems to work very
reliably across different platforms and the recently added JIT really helped a
lot with some of the performance problems that I earlier had with it. But the
gc performance is a real killer for anything that needs to be near realtime, I
have had similar experience as Nikolay when trying to run some simple games
with mzscheme, the gc pauses are shorter on an AMD3400+ but still noticiable.
In comparison similar (naively implemented) programs run smoothly with some of
the other Schemes or CLs that I have used, even with considerably older
(~Pentium III/500mhz class) hardware.
So, am I alone with my problem or is this the expected behaviour and is there
any way to improve/tune the gc performance?

sorry for coming out so negatively yours,
T Neste