What is "Open Language"?

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2015-10-24 22:55, JB wrote:
> If you do get Open Language what will it do to the
> speed?  They said LC8 would be good because it
> will make it easier for developers to write code in
> LC which needed to be and external before.

We're still working on the 'foreign function interface' in LCB, so it is 
not yet as mature as we would like. The benefits of doing it from LCB 
rather than in C is that you don't have to deal with C compilers, 
toolchains and IDEs. (This is particularly pertinent if you are wanting 
to wrap an existing library which you don't have to compile yourself!).

> Then after releasing it they said it is slower to use
> than a external written in C.

Given that most OS APIs do quite heavyweight things execution speed is 
not really a concern. After all, if you are asking the OS 'please render 
this PDF page here', then it matters not one iota what the cost of 
abstraction is to call that OS supplied rendering function - it will 
always be orders of magnitude less than rasterizing millions of pixels.

In most cases, I think you'll generally find that speed of writing code 
for these kind of things is much more important than the speed of the 
bit which marshals things appropriately to call the API.

Now, that is not to say that speed of LiveCode Builder is not important 
to us - because it critically is. We are designing the language to try 
and ensure that it can be compiled and run at speeds which are not too 
dissimilar to native code in the future - this is why variables are 
typed, type conversions are more strict and handler calls are 'static' 
(not determined at runtime) rather than dynamic.

Indeed, the plan is that LiveCode Script (as it is now) and LiveCode 
Builder will eventually sit atop the *same* underlying bytecode-based VM 
so both can benefit from a native compilation strategy (probably based 
on LLVM). The *difference* is that the scope of optimization of LiveCode 
Script will be a great deal less than that for LiveCode Builder due to 
its dynamic design and use.

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps