deadparrotsoftware wrote:I did not realize accessing fields in LC was so slow. In Xojo and Delphi, it is extremely fast. So we would store entire pages of text in text fields. It actually created less overhead than variables.
It would be interesting to learn more about their underlying object structures to find out how their variables became more complex than a GUI control.
LC's text engine is pretty good compared to those of equivalent scope. It can buffer far larger amounts of text than even Microsoft Office apps without needing to page from disk, and the buffering provides a much smoother scrolling experience than you'll find in most office apps.
Do Xojo and Delphi provide the same scope of detailed paragraph-level formatting in a high-level property-driven way that works well on all platforms?
In most languages the simpler the structure the faster the access.
Given the number of steps any system will require to calculate and render font metrics, antialias them, calculate line wraps, adjust scrollbars, rebuild to local object buffer, reblit that back to the composite display buffer, etc., the number of machine instructions needed to work through the object structure to extract the text, do the works on the text, work it back into the object structure and then re-render it for every operation being done on the text is usually orders of magnitude more operations than just a couple of pointer dereferences from a string block.