waveforms + more rants about Rev as a dev. tool for the future

[Richard Gaskin]

I apologize for my earlier misunderstanding.  I was approaching the 
question from a more general standpoint and had not realized it was 
limited in scope to one specific project.

jbv wrote:

> Hence my question : IN THIS SPECIFIC CONTEXT, is it worth adding
> 1.2 Mb just to handle mouse events ? IN THIS SPECIFIC CONTEXT,
> could this be done with some C library ?

Defined in such specific terms it would seem the only person who can 
make that call is you.

 > IOW, which percentage of the code of an app is enough to decide
 > to keep Rev as the central dev. tool ?

That's a very different question, more general than the all-caps 
provisions above.

Rev is a precompiled VM with a rich object model proven to be robust and 
surprisingly efficient across nearly every popular modern operating 
system.  In most apps it replaces a vast majority of what would be C 
code, possibly on the order of 90% in many of them (100% in most of my 
work).

As generalized solutions any framework will add size to an app, the 
tradeoff for being able to write less code.  But for comparison, Apple's 
TextEdit app uses Apple's framework and is 5MB in size, as opposed to 
the roughly 2MB need to do that in Rev; I find many apps that use 
Apple's single-platform framework to be larger than equivalent 
functionality delivered with Rev's omni-platform VM, with the additional 
productivity benefits of working in a much higher-level language (see 
Osterhout: <http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html>) and multiplied by the 
number of target platforms.

If the amount of script you're writing in Rev is greater than the total 
amount of code needed to replicate the whole program in C for each 
platform, taking into consideration the additional testing an debugging 
time usually associated with lower-level work, the objective 
productivity measurements for a given project would speak for themselves.

In my experience such cases are extremely rare.

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