LC7 & Unicode

[Bernard Devlin]

I think the important part of Peter Brett's answer comes after his remarks
on Unicode:

>>
 Internally, the LC7 engine only uses Unicode if it has to.  If your
application only uses native strings, then LC7 will only use native
strings.  Built-in Unicode support has very little to do with the fact that
LC7 is slower for some workloads.

*The cause of potential slow-down is more fundamental, and has to do with
the way that variables and values in the language are handled and the way
that the language is executed. * As Richard says,* some of these changes
were required in order to enable the future development of the LiveCode
language and to make it more flexible and powerful.*
<<

I know no more about unicode than the next person.  Perhaps being able to
sell an app to 1 billion Chinese people might be beneficial to some.  I can
think of a Hebrew app I once wrote which was a nightmare in an earlier
version of Livecode, but which would be far easier now with unicode.

But all the goodness of widgets and the javascript engine and the new "DSL"
language enhancements seem to me to be far more significant than unicode.

I would imagine that the Livecode staff want v8+ to be no slower than
version v6.x.  What is coming in v8 would appear to me to be a bigger
evolutionary step in the history of the engine than all the previous
evolutionary steps combined.  After decades of working with computers, I am
struggling to think of a technology which has attempted to make such a
massive step.  Perhaps the difference between Mac OS 9 and OS X is the kind
of shift we are going to see.  Or between DOS and OS/2. Or Window 3.1 and
Windows NT.  With all of Apple's and Microsoft's and IBM's resources, they
struggled with the performance of the early versions of their technological
shift.

If someone can think of a programming environment which has made an
analogous shift to that which Livecode is undertaking, I'd be interested to
hear.  I can think of an open source database and a web application
framework which made major shifts.  These changes brought very little in
benefit to the projects, and seemed to be vanity projects for those
involved.  But what Livecode are doing with v8 has obvious benefits.  I
really hope they succeed.

Regards,

Bernard

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 7:02 PM, TEDennis <tedennis at softwaredetails.com>
wrote:

> ... we're back to square one, meaning I/we have to live with Unicode's
> performance issues.
>
> I'm wondering how a feature like Unicode that has had a major performance
> impact managed to get past the initial design stage, but that's a different
> issue altogether.  Surely somebody, somewhere foresaw this "enhancement"
> would be a major resource hog.
>
> TED
>
>