From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Jul  9 21:01:04 2003
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Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 05:01:03 +0100 (BST)
From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Pedro=20F.=20Giffuni?=" <giffunip@yahoo.com>
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Subject: New version of ficl (the core of our bootforth)
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I was going to look at ficl-3.03 (our boot code includes 3.02) when I found
this claim about the new ficl-4:

"Ficl 4.0 is a major change for Ficl. Ficl 4.0 is smaller, faster, more
powerful, and easier to use than ever before. (Or your money back!) 
Ficl 4.0 features a major engine rewrite. Previous versions of Ficl stored
compiled words as an array of pointers to data structure; Ficl 4.0 adds
"instructions", and changes over to mostly using a "switch-threaded" model. The
result? Ficl 4.0 is approximately three times as fast as Ficl 3.03. 

Ficl 4.0 also adds the ability to store the "softcore" words as LZ77 compressed
text. Decompression is so quick as to be nearly unmeasurable (0.00384 seconds
on a 750MHz AMD Duron-based machine). And even with the runtime decompressor,
the resulting Ficl executable is over 13k smaller! 

Another new feature: Ficl 4.0 can take advantage of native support for
double-word math. If your platform supports it, set the preprocessor symbol
FICL_HAVE_NATIVE_2INTEGER to 1, and create typedefs for ficl2Integer and
ficl2Unsigned."

http://ficl.sourceforge.net/

enjoy,

   Pedro.

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