On Thu, 16 Jun 2022, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
Finally, a small but probably noticable improvement would come from dropping support for ancient platforms, such as Ultrix. A much bigger win would be to use Bash or Zsh if they are installed, as that allows using modern shell tricks (such as [[ "$a" =~ [0-9]+ ]] and "${a//a/b}") that do not require forking new processes.
The configure script already tries to deduce the best shell (CONFIG_SHELL) to use to run the rest of the configure script. It is pretty common that the shell selected is bash (if it was not already bash).
It has been noticed that bash is rarely the fastest shell out of the options available. For example 'dash' is often used since it tends to execute more quickly.
If projects established a baseline for the antiquity of the targets they support, then the number of tests can be reduced and configure will run faster.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt