You may take a look at http://www.berndabel.de/products/coconut/working.html#performance for a complete discussion of performance aspects in Coconut.
To summarize it here:
- The principal challenge/goal during developing the Coconut emulator was to get the optimum performance out of the (good old) Motorola CPU of a Palm device.
- Mathematical functions which use (machine level) addition/subtraction inside loops, e.g. SIN, COS, are considerably slower, thus, Mr. Bean - "I concentrated on trigonometry" - would be rather unhappy :-\,. On the other hand, LOG, LN, SQRT etc. don't show a visible performance penalty.
- Display characteristics and several system functions are slightly faster (Try the CATALOGs)
- the 'feeling' finally depends on the Palm generation used. Up to now, clock frequencies vary between 16 and 33 MHz. Owners of (33MHz) Palm M50X devices told me that they are quite pleased with the performance but sometimes it would be hard to follow the display, and the BEEP sounds like a short 'diddeldidue'.
Of course you are right - a Pocket PC provides you with a performance gain of at least one order of magnitude. I tested the Coconut kernel on a 200MHz embedded Linux platform and the goose (you remember - the '}') became a roadrunner. Working on that platform often produced NULL's on command input - I was just too slow with releasing the keys ;-)
However, the best way to get an impression of Coconut's performance is just to try it. Happy programming!
--Bernd--