SC, Rev,and RB speed test

[Richard Gaskin]

Chris Yavelow wrote:

> "I've been trying to make up my mind about switching...for a
 > particular project that involves a mammoth amount of text processing."
...
 > It processes millions of characters of text and displays results
 > by way of nearly 400 fields using every square inch of a cinema
 > display, graphs, and other cute interface elements.
> 
> ...so I'm trying to figure out...whether Revolution can't be
 > coaxed to go a bit faster than I'm able to make it.

Gotcha.  Thanks for the background.

If you're willing to trade the productivity benefits of typeless 
languages for raw speed (see 
<http://dev.scriptics.com/doc/scripting.html>), you might find it 
worthwhile to just go with the standard and use C++. There are a few 
good x-plat frameworks around so you can leverage your investment well.

But even if you enjoy lower-level languages you may find a more optimal 
mix using C++ for computationally-intensive tasks inside of a GUI built 
with ease in Rev. I see few multi-platform applications that could not 
improve their ROI with that mix, esp. given the hooks available with the 
Embedded Engine option.

Before I could make any specific recommendation I would need to 
understand why the UI has 400 fields on it.  To someone unfamiliar with 
the project it sounds like information overload for the user, and the 
display time for such a UI may be a bigger bottleneck than focusing on 
text processing alone.

And as David Vaughan suggested, learning specifics about the data set 
itself may yield optimal algorithms which can give you very good 
performance while leveraging your extensive experience with xTalk.

My WebMerge product is all about text processing, parsing database 
content of 50,000 records or more and generating static HTML pages from 
them.  I haven't really begun optimizing it (I have a new code base in 
development that will likely double its speed), yet it's fully-native 
Transcript code base gets strong reviews for many things including 
speed, as you can read at 
<http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/gallery.html>.

With a little knowledge of what your data looks like and how it's used 
I'm confident that good performance levels can be reached with Rev, and 
with a nearly unbeatable ROI that takes all development and maintenance 
issues into account.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com