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

[Curry Kenworthy]

Richard:

 > If you're satisfied the the progress on yours then of course you
 > can safely ignore my passing that along.

Thanks Richard - all great things to bear in mind, when kept realistic. 
Areas affected by performance were pretty widespread, so it'll be easier 
to isolate any remaining areas and create new tests once the current 
memory/array/other improvements are in place. That will be an exciting 
followup.

But looking at LC Mark's optimization items, I am quite pleased with the 
progress so far and the approach taken. My tests and others have been 
converted to benchmarks, and a variety of improvements have been 
tackled, so I think very good things are in store sooner or later. I 
have always believed and promoted that LC 9 beating 6 on speed would be 
possible and desirable, and that day may come soon. Very invigorating. 
My thanks again to LC Mark for these optimization efforts!

Malte:

 > And of course, please also be vocal on the positives!!!

That's easy; we're always positive! :D There are so many additions in LC 
7-9 that it would take a while to discuss, but here are some that were 
significant for me.

One of my favorites was column tabAlign in fields. Many LiveCoders still 
don't realize that they can often use a single field rather than a data 
grid for displaying tabbed text. With those column alignments fully 
supported as of LC 9, all the more incentive to keep stacks lean and 
mean when building new or updating. The only thing still lacking is word 
processing style tab aligns for normal text, and of course an option for 
column text wrap would be a huge improvement.

Another item I enjoyed and used for refactoring is the "resolve" keyword 
for images. Not only good for optimization, but also for accuracy and 
avoiding conflicts. That's what I consider a completely positive example 
of refactoring, because it's a definite improvement over even the best 
LC 6 code, rather than an arbitrary change or correcting bad habits.

I was less impressed by the new textDecode function, because while it 
results in cleaner code (and you should use it to ensure accuracy) the 
performance was actually worse than legacy LC 6 methods, if memory 
serves, and in this case I'm talking about an LC 9 versus 9 speed 
comparison with those respective sets of code. It shouldn't be slower, 
if indeed it is; my legacy methods were even jumping a few extra hoops 
for the sake of ~100% Unicode accuracy on older LCs, so textDecode had 
every advantage. That's probably another enhancement request I should 
test and file, the first chance I get.

Best wishes,

Curry Kenworthy

Custom Software Development
"Better Methods, Better Results"
LiveCode Training and Consulting
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