How do you handle the poor performance of LC 7?

Ray ray at linkit.com
Fri May 29 17:59:28 EDT 2015


Earlier today I jumped in briefly on this thread to confirm I had also 
experienced slower performance and on the same hand I'd like to jump 
back in now in full agreement with Trevor.  Coincidentally, just 
yesterday I was railing on to my wife (an excellent listener) about the 
old Hypercard days back in the late 1980's and how a very secretive 
Apple strung us along for years 'leading us to believe' they were 
continuing to support it, when if fact it was nothing more than that, 
'leading us on'.

In sharp contrast, the Livecode team has been nothing but open, 
visionary, dedicated and productive.  They've consistently done an 
excellent job of keeping Livecode on the leading edge.  This week I 
finally got around to building an app for iPhone/android.  It was 
relatively easy and I'm excited to delve into the many features these 
devices offer that I can now tap into via Livecode.  I thought of the 
conference in Edinburgh I attended years ago when Kevin Miller was 
almost beside himself with excitement as he shared his first successes 
in that area.

I've gotten around the slower performance in the script editor by 
dividing large scripts into multiple libraries, something which is 
probably good coding practice I should have been doing anyway. Regarding 
the slower production performance, it seems we have a variety of sound 
suggestions here which will help any of us address that issue while 
continuing to take advantage of the latest and greatest coming out of 
Edinburgh.

On 5/29/2015 11:20 PM, Trevor DeVore wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Andrew Kluthe <andrew at ctech.me> wrote:
>
>> ...
>>
>> It's not really an excuse to sit back and wait for someone else to find out
>> the bugs as it is the hard reality of some people's situations.
>>
>> In short, the request for us to invest this much time in helping them
>> figure it out is almost as stressful as the actual problems.
>>
>> The Us (community) vs Them (RunRev) that persists is the result that most
>> of the people started using this software when it was still proprietary.
>> It's a big step for many of us to transition to. Particularly, if we came
>> to runrev/livecode to save us on development/prototyping time. Our
>> community used to be so sure of the praises of livecode. It really was and
>> will again sometime be a fantastic product. But I'm sorry to say v7 is not
>> a production quality toolset for those without tons of extra time on their
>> hands.
>>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> I've been reading the responses to this thread and wanted to add some
> additional thoughts. I understand where you are coming from and I don't
> mean to argue against what you are saying. Each developer has different
> needs and has different resources to allocate. Rather, I just want to add a
> different perspective as the perspective most often shared on the mailing
> list is from those experiencing problems with LC 7. I would like others
> reading to know that there are people being productive with 7/8 right now.
> It seems that the big issue that some have run into has to do with
> processing large amounts of data. I don't do that within LiveCode itself. I
> do a lot of work with arrays, however, and as Mark Waddingham has pointed
> out, working with arrays is much more efficient in LC 7. I'm really
> enjoying that. Now, I do see a slow-down in the IDE, particularly the
> script editor, which I would like to see addressed, but that doesn't affect
> my product.
>
> I very much view my relationship with RunRev as a partnership rather than a
> me vs. them. I've chosen LiveCode as my desktop development tool and I
> believe in the vision that Kevin, Mark, and the team have for the product.
> I've heard them discuss that vision over the 12 years that I've been using
> LC. I see the changes being made in LC 7/8 as major steps in realizing that
> vision. I love that LC is robust enough a tool for me to create my
> products, while at the same time being easy enough to learn that I can
> teach my young kids math and programming lessons using it. Because I
> believe in that vision I don't mind allocating time troubleshooting bugs so
> that the product can move forward. Most of the time those bugs are ones I
> find while working on my product and they affect me directly. But not
> always. Either way, I want the product to be the best it can be. I spend
> more time tracking down my own bugs so every once in a  while it is nice to
> track down a bug that somebody else has to fix :-)
>
> Now, if LiveCode was sitting back on a buggy product and not trying to
> improve it then I would have issues. As I've stated before, though, I watch
> the work the team is doing via github. I also keep an eye on the bug
> database. It gives me insight as to where LiveCode is headed and what is
> being done to improve the stability of the product. What I see is a
> commitment to making a great product. I see test frameworks being developed
> (thanks Peter!), bugs being fixed, and time being spent with valgrind on
> Linux to make sure there are no memory leaks. I also see these improvements
> getting rolled into the steady builds being released to developers so that
> we can get work done.
>
> As I've reflected on the architectural changes made in LC 7, I see a
> project which could very well cause a company to fail. It was a huge
> project with few immediate or obvious advantages to developers. (Well, the
> unicode improvements are quite significant to some. I still stop and smile
> every time I write code in LC 7/8 that would have required workarounds to
> support unicode in the past.) Like all major projects, it took longer than
> expected. My bet is that many companies would not have been able to make
> that transition. Given the nature of the transition to LC 7 I feel a little
> extra sympathy for the engineers when I come across issues.
>
> Currently I'm working on a major product upgrade that I started in LC 7 and
> then moved to LC 8. I feel that it is far and away the best product I have
> created in LiveCode to date. It looks fantastic! Widgets have made my
> design work much easier and allowed me to create controls I couldn't
> before. And it has full unicode support. I realize that I am more
> adventurous than some but I've been releasing products with development
> versions of LC for years. If I test my product and I don't run into any
> issues then why not!
>
> So to anyone thinking that they should steer clear of LC 7 because of what
> you have read on the list, you should see how your project performs in LC
> 7. You may not see any performance issues at all. If you are using anything
> less than 6.7 your apps look bad on high-resolution displays (Mac and
> Windows). If you are using 6.7 your apps can still fail with unicode
> issues. If you do get your app up and running in LC 7 (which may not
> require any extra effort at all) then you are ready to go once you want to
> dive into 8. And I think 8 is just awesome, even in its infant state.
>





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