LiveCode Forums

I was working with LC for 4 years, then we decided to rewrite everything in native language. There were lot of bugs, memory leaks, IDE was extremly slow, standalone too. With over 8000-10000 rows in script editor it's totally unusable.

I have I7 3.4 Ghz with 16 GB ram Windows, but still shit. Tried on MAC and still the same.

Today, i had to use LC again, after 1 year, i hoped it'll be better now, but after half hour i realized it's even worse Script editor and the whole IDE is extremly slow, it's really really frustrating to working with.

You should warn users for LC not applicable for professional programming.

Somehow, I don't think that the people who use it professionally for their livelihood would agree with your assessment, brotee.

You sound sincere.

But large companies use LC for large projects.

And from what you describe, you are no "newbie" at all. So it just speed? For example, Hypercard did not really care how many cards were in a stack. But LC does; if more than just a few thousand, it slows dramatically. So the common way around that is to use external files. This is "out" of LC proper, but nevertheless utterly straightforward.

Is it possible there is something we can help with?

Craig Newman

Hello brotee,

Which version of LiveCode did you use? There was a slowness in the script editor with large scripts on Windows, which was fixed in the latest version (LiveCode 9.0.1 RC-1):

https://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/

Best,
Panos
--

If your biggest concern is the speed of editing scripts in the IDE, you could use something like ScriptTracker to export the scripts and edit them in something like Atom (which provides Linting).

https://github.com/bwmilby/lc-misc/tree ... iptTracker

Just reread the OP first post.

I have been building an in-house program for quite a while. It has nearly 9000 lines of code, and I have never noticed any slowdown in the SE at all, either in scrolling, finding text, editing text, whatever.

We all make small gadgets constantly. I notice no difference in a script of 10 lines.

LC 8,1,9 on a Mac.

Craig

Windows 10

LC 8 was completely unusable for me, and there have been large problems with LC 9 in the script editor.
Sometimes I could be typing for 20 or 30 seconds with no visual change on screen. Then all the text appeared as if it had been pasted in. Copying and pasting script lines was a nightmare as you could never rely on the insertion point to be showing in the right place, and correcting a mistake was horrendous for the same reason. When you used Ctrl+V to paste, the SE would often just vanish.
These issues have got better through the LC9.0 dp to gm series. Using 9.0.1 RC1, I have not had any serious problems so far.
Project Browser issues remain, but there have been improvements there too. I wish it wouldn't keep disappearing though. If I want to go back to it after making an edit, it has gone from the screen, but still shows as selected in the menu. I have to turn it off and back on again to see it, every time.

Just reread the OP first post.

I have been developing over the last 8 years a program that has something like half
a million lines of code (many. many objects with 5-6 thousand lines of code each),
and deploying it to Mac, Win and Lin: it works smoothly and at a perfectly acceptable speed.

So, if your work is going slowly it might be something to do with the nature of your code
rather than LiveCode itself.

About 6 years ago my Devawriter Pro started slowing down in a horrible way, and it took me quite
some time to realise that using SWITCH . . . CASE statements was far, far more efficient than thousands of IF . . . THEN statements.

I spent a "dirty weekend" (well more like 3 weeks) recoding the whole thing. Fairly frustrating at the time: but paid off later!

Part of the reason for this was that I came from a history of BBC BASIC which did not, in 1989, have CASE.

We all bring our "baggage" with us to new programming languages.

So after reading Sparkout's post I am astonished that these issues have not raised their heads much earlier. How can that be?

Sparkout, how have you survived with the things you described, and kept silent to boot?

Does the team have any knowledge of this?

I have never seen any of it. Can it be machine-specific? OS? Gremlins?

Craig

I haven't been silent, I just haven't been able to get a reliable recipe to put on the bug list, which is the only place it will get serious attention. There are plenty of "general" bug listings like this there though. Survival has only been because using LiveCode is not my "day job".

I know Windows is not as popular a platform. It does get attention though. The general feeling I get is that the mothership "know about some stuff, we're working on improving things". LC 9.0.1 is better than any IDE since 7.x. Just today though here's another example... you use arrow key to move the cursor up or down one line, or several. The screen scrolls and scrolls as if the arrow key is held down. I can't reproduce this on demand.

I don't work in the newer IDEs enough to really contribute to this discussion other than to say one reason I don't is that, much as Sparkout points out, 7x seemed to be the end of a really great series to me. The flow and speed of the IDE always works much faster (I'll add the qualifier "on my machine(s)") than anything later, and they seem to present me with less quirky behavior.

Richard (and others) have had a few different thoughts as to why they would only use the latest versions, of course I mostly work on older systems to boot and don't require mobile or html and so don't need the latest and greatest features anyway. Special snow flake me, heh

Having said that, though, I do occaisionally poke around through the new IDEs. I don't see their progress as any better or worse than any of the other IDEs I use on a regular basis that are in a similar comparison group.

Yes, the livecode 7 is the best for coding speed and stability.
After started the transition to widgets, and the IDE is no more fast as before*, the property inspector is a little mess now and I hate the project browser because is too slow, meanwhile I loved the application browser (fast and easy).
*For example, sometimes the the row numbering doesn't flow with the scroll of text.
However I prefer to use always the last version, this way I post bugs and liveocode improves.
Livecode rules!!!

meanwhile I loved the application browser (fast and easy).

The application browser is still available in the Plugins menu, called revApplicationOverview. It's all I use, I never open the project browser.

jacque wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:21 pm

meanwhile I loved the application browser (fast and easy).

The application browser is still available in the Plugins menu, called revApplicationOverview. It's all I use, I never open the project browser.

And I almost never use, unless I am working in Lc 2.x or lower

jacque wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:21 pm

meanwhile I loved the application browser (fast and easy).

The application browser is still available in the Plugins menu, called revApplicationOverview. It's all I use, I never open the project browser.

I love you Jacque!!!
Thank you!!!!!