LC 8 speed advantages??

RM richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sun May 8 03:33:17 EDT 2016


Speed advantages are like many things; they depend on a large number of
variables.

I can imagine a test that runs much faster in 7 than in 8,
and the other way round.

I do have a feeling that the Livecode people have shifted their attention to
slightly different goals with 8 than they were focussing on in 4,5,6 & 7,
and it would natural for them to look for speed advantages in the areas
they are specifically targetting.

If Livecode are guilty of anything it might be that they have 
over-generalised.

Had they said "3.5 times faster in graphics handling", or
"3.5 times faster in text-processing" there would be nothing to get 
picky about.

But almost all software vendors make claims like this: 
https://livecode.com/products/livecode-platform/

"Build Powerful Apps Faster"

which when one starts to tease them apart (especially that one) turn out 
to be almost
meaningless:

1. That presupposes we are trying to build exactly the same 'app' with 
LC 8 we were building with LC 7,
     which is silly as we have already built the thing with LC 7.

2. Faster than "what"? There is actually no point of comparison.

That does not mean, of course, that LC 8 might, in general, allow one
to build 'apps' more quickly than with LC 7.

I am quite sure that, once Livecode have sorted out ALL the bugs that 
still seem to be there
in LC 8 "stable" that LC 8 will be capable of many more things than LC 7 
is; whether, in some way, things
will be faster remains to be seen.

At the moment, I think we should be fossicking out as many of the 
remaining bugs as we can and letting the
Livecode people know about them so they can do their best to sort them 
out and really release something that is
both stable AND not lacking in features that were there in version 7 AND 
works smoothly, rather than fussing
over statements such as "3.5 times faster": face it, that's largely 
advertising "puff"; not something we, established Livecode
users should be unduly fussed about. There are far more important things 
to be fussed about, and while, as has been
pointed out by another, Livecode is a bit vague about the term 
"Community", we, if we do, somehow, constitute a
"Community" should rally round and both help Livecode and send them a 
strong signal that as we care so should they.

Richmond.

On 8.05.2016 00:52, Howard Bornstein wrote:
> "LiveCode 8 is on average 3.5 times faster than LiveCode 7"
>
> I was very interested to see this claim as I had been hoping for better
> speeds in a text manipulation app I wrote.
>
> After building a standalone with LC 8, I ran the same test file in the new
> LC8 standalone as a version I compiled in LC7.
>
> In LC7, the standalone processed the text file in 28 seconds. In the "much
> faster" LC8 version, the file took 38 seconds! What's up with that?
> This program only uses text manipulation—no graphics work at all—so it
> should have shown a substantial speed up, according to this quote on the LC
> website: "In LiveCode 8 we’ve completely rewritten our low level string and
> binary implementations for speed and performance."
>
> Needless to say, I was very surprised at this result. Has anyone seen
> similar (or contrary) results with text manipulation?
>





More information about the use-livecode mailing list