Fast actions

The execution of an ECS action had three major steps:

1)

enter and leave the system  

2)

find and check types of all parameters  

3)

perform the action  

Steps 1 and 2 together consumed from 200 to 250 microseconds for most actions. For many actions step 3 consumed about 100 microseconds. One of the parameters which had to be found and checked was the operation (an object), which specified the action. This consumed from 40 to 50 microseconds. (The next chapter will contain a more detailed description of parameter fetching.) We proposed to invent a new type of capability, that for a 'fastaction'. All capabilities for such actions would contain a pointer to code which would fetch and check the parameters, and then execute the action. We expected that this together with some miscellaneous improvements in the code for the actions would reduce the CPU time for such actions by 100 to 150 microseconds, a reduction by about 50