I also tried composition in Cuis4.2 which is interesting because it uses the primitive 103, but is around 111ms for other reasons

| text |
text := Compiler evaluate: (FileStream fileNamed: 'text_cuis.st') contentsOfEntireFile.
MessageTally spyOn: [[100 timesRepeat: [(TextComposer new)
�� composeLinesFrom: 1
�� to: text size
�� delta: 0
�� into: OrderedCollection new
�� priorLines: OrderedCollection new
�� atY: 0
�� text: text
�� extentForComposing: ( 569@9999999)]] timeToRun ].

2013/10/11 Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com>

It's COG that's impressive in this case (well, as long as Spur is not ready).
Indeed, the latest squeak still spends 713ms with a 4.10.10 interpreter VM, so primitive 103 makes a difference...

On the Pi, it still makes sense to try and restore primitive 103 - for the simple case of StrikeFont and ByteString...

2013/10/11 David T. Lewis <lewis@mail.msen.com>

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 05:02:56PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> It looks like we can feel good about the last week or so's work. Thanks for joining in and doing such good work.
>

Really impressive!

Dave