Speed of RR vs SuperCard

[Ken Norris]

**********
> From: livfoss at blueyonder.co.uk
> Subject: Speed of RR vs SuperCard
> Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 12:21:27 +0100
> 
> Folks,  I am not looking for any kind of controversy or X-talk war, but I
> would like to know if anyone has done any speed comparisons between Revolution
> and SuperCard (on Mac platforms of course). I'd always believed that Revo
> would be faster, since it's more thoroughly compiled than SC, but recently
> I've re-written one of my SC apps in Revo, and a tester reports that it runs
> 'like treacle' on an old Mac (pre-G3, running MacOS8.6).
----------snip
If the comparison is being made to the same app in latest version of SC
running on the same machine, then you do indeed have more investigating to
do.

However, if it is just being estimated to run slow (with no comparison to
the SC app on the same machine), the problem may be 3-fold:

1) The usual culprit is lack of memory. Max the memory in the old Mac.

2) Pre-G3 processors run slower for many things. But I assume we are still
talking PPC, though. I don't think OS 8.6 will run on a 68K machine.

3) Running OS 8.6 on a pre-G3 processor on some Macs makes them run slower
for lots of various apps, extensions, etc., e.g., OS 8.6 runs notoriously
slow on 603e 133mHz processors. This may affect how the MetaCard (Rev's
engine) interpreter functions more dramatically than the SC interpreter
because of differences in design.

On my G4, Rev is very fast for most stuff, much faster than HC which, I
think, uses the same style of interpreter as SC.

The MC engine for Rev continues to be upgraded. It may well be that as time
goes on it will sacrifice performance compatibility with old machines and
OS'  in favor of taking advantage of modern processors and OS'.

We know that's just how it is in the digital world.

HTH,
Ken N.