Refactoring is your friend / moving from 6.x to 9.x

[Malte Pfaff-Brill]

Hi list,

I finally found the time to test / move one of my old projects from the 6.x (started in 3.x) to the 9.x engine. At first I was very very disappointed about performance. The stack was somewhat between acceptable and snappy in the 6.x engine series, rather unusable on 8 and on 9. This basically led to so much frustration that I basically gave up on the project, coding and LiveCode as a whole. 

I had a bit of time on my own during the holidays, so I started to analyse where the slowdowns actually happened. It seems I do owe the 9.x engine an apology, expecting everything to work as it used to in 6 is not the way I should have gone. After a refactor of my scripts I am now sitting with a version of my stack that works faster as it did in 5.x / 6.x.

General and fixable observations:

The IDE spams a lot of IDE only messages when creating many objects by script -> remedy: Lock messages
Nested Lock screens are a big "NO-NO“ nowadays
You can not rely on the screen being unlocked immediately at the end of a handler

Not yet fixable for me:
Array operations on larger data sets still slower than they were

Non engine related:
My SQL-Fu has improved a bit ;-) Quite a bit of performance to gain there.

Did anybody of you happen to refactor old code and if so, do you have any observations you might want to share?

Cheers,

Malte