matchText question

[Richard Gaskin]

Michael Doub wrote:

 > Thanks for the feedback.  I did not know about revAvailableHandlers.

I believe it's engine-level, which means it not only provides more 
useful info than most alternatives (type, line offsets, etc.), it's also 
much faster.

Not sure why it isn't documented, but it's enormously valuable for 
static analysis tools.


 > As it turns out, that this whole adventure could have been avoided
 > if I had better understood the performance implications of the
 > different repeat forms.
 >
 > That all said.   Are you guys aware of any performance analysis tools
 > for livecode developers?

Now that you've seen the difference between "repeat with" and "repeat 
for each", you'll likely never again find a single change with such 
dramatic results, so you're more or less done. :)

Still, sometimes it can be useful to trim a microsecond or two - this 
article has some tips on performance benchmaring, and includes a link to 
RevBench, a very simple tool for comparing alternate algos to find the 
best one:
<http://livecodejournal.com/tutorials/benchmarking-revtalk.html>

As for runtime profiling, the only such tool I've seen was an option in 
the MC IDE's Script Editor, which was interesting but added so much 
overhead to execution that it often slowed things down prohibitively.

Inspired by that I added a very modest form of profiling relative 
execution times in my Flight Recorder tool:
<http://fourthworld.net/revnet/devolution/4W_FlightRecorder.rev.gz>

The main benefit of Flight Recorder is as a general message logger, but 
it does include loose approximations of relative time spent in each handler.

With the speed of the LC engine, almost any scripted solution will be 
both impaired and impairing ("Observer effect"):  the overhead it adds 
will alter execution.

It would be nice to have something operating at a deeper level, but I'm 
not sure what that would look like....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for Desktop, Mobile, and Web
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