LC7 & Unicode

[Peter TB Brett]

On 2015-03-10 19:41, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Terence Heaford wrote:
> 
>> Can LC 7 & LC 8 be coded to enable Unicode to be switched “on”/“off”
>> either globally or on an individual control basis?
> 
> Not likely.
> 
> Unicode affects all things that deal with strings.  That's pretty much
> most of the engine.
> 

This is a common misconception.  Internally, the LC7 engine only uses 
Unicode if it has to.  If your application only uses native strings, 
then LC7 will only use native strings.  Built-in Unicode support has 
very little to do with the fact that LC7 is slower for some workloads.

The cause of potential slow-down is more fundamental, and has to do with 
the way that variables and values in the language are handled and the 
way that the language is executed.  As Richard says, some of these 
changes were required in order to enable the future development of the 
LiveCode language and to make it more flexible and powerful.

We care about performance.  Mark, who designed the LC7 engine, has done 
some quite extensive work recently -- even in his own time, over 
weekends -- to look for opportunities to improve performance.  It's been 
invaluable for us to get hold of some real-world stacks that we've been 
given by users and developers.

                                    Peter

-- 
Dr Peter Brett
LiveCode Engine Development Team