[Simh] Alpha simulator performance

[Nathan Cutler]

> If you are concerned about performance, it is unlikely that SIMH implementation
> of Alpha (which apparently is in works, but hard to guess when it might become
> available) will "ever" match the performance of free versions of commercial
> emulators. The latter do JIT binary compilation, whereas SIMH performs
> interpretation of instruction stream and is unlikely to have JIT for the
> foreseeable future if ever at all.

Thanks, Sergey, for your excellent and informative reply! I'm not so
much concerned about performance as about the whole principle of it.
SimH is free-as-in-libre software and it runs on free-as-in-libre
platforms. So, if it supported Alpha I would prefer it over
throttled-down commercial emulators running on Windows just for the
convenience of not having to run Windows, even if they ran circles
around SimH.

As it is, I find myself running SimH to get my VMS fix, anyway,
instead of firing up the RX2600 which of course runs much faster.
Especially after I figured out how to use the VT terminal with SimH.

Not dissing the commercial emulators - they are fine and nice to have
available; I just find them inconvenient to use.

I'm beginning to regret bringing up my wish-list item at all :-)