Sprite Kit, Box2D, Performance and LiveCode's Approach to Game Coding

[Mark Wilcox]

I wrote an extensive response to your original mail on this thread but sadly lost it to rubbish Yahoo! webmail + the 15k limit on the list. (FWIW, JavaScript is not 50 times slower than C++ but with modern JS engines like Google's v8 more like 5 times + that amazing Citadel demo with the unreal engine is compiled from C++ to asm.js & WebGL and the asm.js is then ahead of time compiled to native code in the browser before it is run - IIRC it only works in Firefox nightlies and is sadly unlikely to be supported in browsers other than Firefox anytime soon).

>> Can't a coding platform be blazing-fast yet having an excellent IDE, built on an event-driven foundation and supporting multiple platforms?

The answer here is yes (try coding for Qt in C++ using their excellent Qt Creator IDE) but you also want the convenience of a high-level dynamic language and in that case the answer is no. Even in the article you linked, the author had to give up the convenience of Objective-C and drop down to C++ to get that level of optimisation.

The good news is you can also drop down into C++ from LiveCode, so if you really need to optimise some algorithm to that level, you can.

The other thing to note is that hardware advances also bail us out, making more and more possible with inefficient tools - the iPhone 5 is about 10 times faster than the iPhone 3G used in that article.

Mark