[ANN] Help with a LiveCode Presentation/Demo

[Peter W A Wood]

Kay

On 5 Jun 2013, at 14:07, Kay C Lan wrote:

> I notice that the claim of MetaCard being 30 times faster than
> JavaScript/Shell dates back to 1996. Since then I'm aware of at least 2
> major engine improvements to Rev/LC. Anyone have any idea of how much
> faster LC is today? Empirical evidence not required, best guesstimate fine
> by me.

I think it will always be the case that language performance is not generally uniform, some things will be faster in one language (eg arithmetic) whilst somethings will be slower (string handling). However, there have been quite unimaginable performance improvements in JavaScript over the past years and I would suspect that on the whole JavaScript executes "faster" than LiveCode.

Here's a little test that I ran in the Message Box, it concatenates 1,000,000 !s to Hello World:

	put the long seconds into tStart
	put "Hello World" into tHW
	repeat for 1000000 times
		put tHW & "!" into tHW
	end repeat
	put the long seconds into tEnd
	put tEnd - tStart into tTimeTaken
	put tTimeTaken

It took 82.607967 seconds on my machine.

Here's the equivalent in JavaScript:

    var end;
    var timeTaken;
    var i;
    
    var start = new Date().getTime();
    
    var hw = 'hello';
    for (i = 1; i < 1000000; i++) {
    	hw += '!';
    }
    
    end = new Date().getTime();
    timeTaken = end - start;
    print(timeTaken);

It took on average 145 milliseconds to run on my machine under Google's V8.

It may be a very poor test but it shows how much faster JavaScript can be when compared to LiveCode (and hence the dangers of such comparisons).

Hope your presentation goes well.

Peter

http://LiveCode1001.blogspot.com