Why Visual Studio 2012 is important.

[Moonchild]

"Just another version bump"?
Not this time...

of course VS2012 has better compiler than VS2010.
But the overall improvements would not be that much

You know one reason why I want to move to VS2012 ASAP? The nice addition of auto-vectorization, which can severely improve the speed of loops in code.
Now, you probably won't see a huge jump in benchmarks, considering most those do is test already manually optimized code, but you -will- notice it in overall browser responsiveness and some real-world tests. Preliminary builds using VS2012 have indeed confirmed the very noticeable performance increase in more smoothness of the browser. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait for Microsoft to release the update 1 in November, before I can build for the XP platform with these advantages.

More information: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nativeconcurren ... aster.aspx

Combining this with extending this vectorization to actually using multiple cores in modern processors (auto-parallelization) when available will further improve speed and efficiency.

EDIT: And it will use SSE4.2 when possible in addition to SSE2:

The Auto-Vectorizer analyzes loops in your code, and uses the vector registers and instructions in your computer to execute them, if it can. This can improve the performance of your code. The compiler targets the SSE2 instructions in Intel or AMD processors, or the NEON instructions on ARM processors. The Auto-Vectorizer also uses the newer, SSE4.2 instruction set if your computer supports it.

[Ryrynz]

Nice to have that clarified here, thanks. Will 15.3 simply be a recompile of 15.2 with VS2012 or are there other changes planned also?

[tribaljet]

Great news, especially SSE 4.2 support.

[Moonchild]

Nice to have that clarified here, thanks. Will 15.3 simply be a recompile of 15.2 with VS2012 or are there other changes planned also?

There are other changes - the 15.2 code doesn't compile cleanly on VS2012 and a few code changes are required. 15.3 will also see the necessary security updates ported back from Firefox, of course.

[stravinsky]

Great news, especially SSE 4.2 support.

http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=576#p2604

Moonchild wrote:
SSE 3 and 4 extend operations that are not heavily used in the code base, so gains would be marginal at best.

http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=206

Moonchild wrote:
The specific advantages of using SSE3 and SSE4 would be mostly interesting for video and sound processing, not for a browser. The areas where these kinds of calculations are used (graphics libraries) are already manually optimized.

eg. turbolibjpg is already mostly ASM code.

[tribaljet]

...

Thank you for the pointless links. It's nothing I haven't seen earlier, and the fact is that improvements are in order.

[stravinsky]

i notice your post addresses nothing i linked to.
If you arent familiar with the source code, why dont you STFU, and make informed posts rather than rants?

[tribaljet]

Learn some manners before talking to others.

[stravinsky]

Thank you for the pointless links. It's nothing I haven't seen earlier, and the fact is that improvements are in order.

Is it possible to make a more generalized statement than this ?

....

Childish tantrums aside, I am still waiting for you to address the links i posted. What according to you has changed in the mozilla source code, that will benefit hugely from SSE4.2, that has got you so excited ?

[Admin]

There is no need for this kind of bickering.

As for Stravinsky, he can go cool his heels a little; there's no reason to be rude and tell someone to STFU when they don't directly reply to just a few links to other posts with segments taken out of context.

Now, can we be civil from here on out, boys and girls? Yes? Thank you

[dark_moon]

Is this the update for Win XP?:
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 – Final CTP

Enable XP targeting with C++

[Moonchild]

It's the CTP for it, but yes, that would be it - and probably stable enough in the C++ part of it.

[Ryrynz]

Is there a performance tradeoff for Windows 7/8 machines as a result of having XP support specified?

[Moonchild]

Is there a performance tradeoff for Windows 7/8 machines as a result of having XP support specified?

Not as far as I know. As it is though, there is no documentation whatsoever on how to build for XP from the command-line (which is the way Pale Moon is built). Until I know how to actually make a build for XP that work, releases will continue to be built with VS2010 (because I honestly don't want to make a split build again if i can avoid it, and I don't want to disadvantage XP users).

[dark_moon]

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/e ... 012-update

[Moonchild]

Thanks but I was already well-aware - and had already sussed out how to build with update 1 (obviously, since 15.3.* is VS2012 )