SC, Rev,and RB speed test
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Apr 16 00:26:10 EDT 2004
Chris Yavelow wrote:
> "I've been trying to make up my mind about switching...for a
> particular project that involves a mammoth amount of text processing."
...
> It processes millions of characters of text and displays results
> by way of nearly 400 fields using every square inch of a cinema
> display, graphs, and other cute interface elements.
>
> ...so I'm trying to figure out...whether Revolution can't be
> coaxed to go a bit faster than I'm able to make it.
Gotcha. Thanks for the background.
If you're willing to trade the productivity benefits of typeless
languages for raw speed (see
<http://dev.scriptics.com/doc/scripting.html>), you might find it
worthwhile to just go with the standard and use C++. There are a few
good x-plat frameworks around so you can leverage your investment well.
But even if you enjoy lower-level languages you may find a more optimal
mix using C++ for computationally-intensive tasks inside of a GUI built
with ease in Rev. I see few multi-platform applications that could not
improve their ROI with that mix, esp. given the hooks available with the
Embedded Engine option.
Before I could make any specific recommendation I would need to
understand why the UI has 400 fields on it. To someone unfamiliar with
the project it sounds like information overload for the user, and the
display time for such a UI may be a bigger bottleneck than focusing on
text processing alone.
And as David Vaughan suggested, learning specifics about the data set
itself may yield optimal algorithms which can give you very good
performance while leveraging your extensive experience with xTalk.
My WebMerge product is all about text processing, parsing database
content of 50,000 records or more and generating static HTML pages from
them. I haven't really begun optimizing it (I have a new code base in
development that will likely double its speed), yet it's fully-native
Transcript code base gets strong reviews for many things including
speed, as you can read at
<http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/gallery.html>.
With a little knowledge of what your data looks like and how it's used
I'm confident that good performance levels can be reached with Rev, and
with a nearly unbeatable ROI that takes all development and maintenance
issues into account.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
___________________________________________________________
Ambassador at FourthWorld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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