Livecode still way too slow....

[FourthWorld]

@bogs: which field bugs were introduced in v9?

Hm, I'm pretty sure I said -

Aside from speed, there have been new errors ceeping into fields as well as Craig pointed out with the table field, although that started back in 7 (I think, maybe it was 6.7.x ).

Although it was reported in the bug db when it was initially discovered (I still think it was in 7.x), apparently almost no one knew about it or remembered it till Craig pointed out the random table cell issue more recently, a thread a lot of people showed interest in. In any case, it isn't new to 9.x, recently is when it was 'rediscovered'.

Probably my poor choice of wording is again at fault, for that my apologies

I'm not trying to be a stickler about version number citation, I'm just trying to see bugs get fixed.

Can you point me to the bug report?

[bogs]

Pretty sure I listed it in that thread, lemme go check..........

( A short time later)

Ah, here it is, bug 18983, as well as bug # 20494

And I was wrong, although Craig was a HUGE contributor in the thread, apparently "raugert" gets the credit for rediscovery of the bug. Aint senility great?

[FourthWorld]

Thanks, Bogs. I'm now subscribed to those reports.

[bogs]

Glad I could help, I subscribed to your 'launch after install' bug {Which reminds me, it is about time to go say it still isn't fixed}

[bwmilby]

Also don't agree with the LCB path taken. I think LC script itself should be improved to handle that task as well instead of creating a new language (without IDE too...).

That is a point I have been musing about. I do not use LCB.

@Richard. Can you give a brief summary of the benefit/momentum/excitement/ROI of the LCB world? Is it attracting new users that might not otherwise consider LC? Is it enabling existing LC users mightily?

For the work I'm doing at the moment LC Script has been more than sufficient; I haven't yet encountered a need for LC Builder myself.

But the ability to directly access OS APIs from a friendly scripting language sure blows the pants off of having to use C with the older externals interface, and a lot of people seem to like it.

Even as a relative newcomer to the LiveCode community, I think that LCB will be a tremendous asset.

LCB is going to be what enables all kinds of new OS functionality within LC. It may not be taken up by a large portion of the LC community, but every widget or library that is put into play will be easily used by the wider community.

Just take a look at some of the things that are being included in Levure because of LCB like the Sparkle framework. Sure, external code could be integrated with LC before, but it was much more work.

Here's another example of what is possible:
https://github.com/PaulMcClernan/LCB_macAVMidiPlayer

And for a good collection of user widgets:
http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=93&t=28020

So, there may not be a large number of people attracted to the platform to code in LCB themselves, but there will be a much larger audience attracted due to things that are directly enabled by LCB.

As someone who has worked on one of the included widgets, I can say that the code is not that difficult. I was able to take the Tree View widget and fix a few bugs and add some features without that much trouble. Doing that for a control that was built into the engine would not have been easy at all.

[SparkOut]

Re: LCB, I think that at present it seems like there are only a few hardcore users, mainly because I believe the language is just that much too far removed from LCS for people to have an easy way in, and there is a terrible lack of spoonfeeding info to be able to wean people onto it. The pink ball widget just makes a pink ball. You can then examine and change a few things but looking at doing anything else, you don't get any intuition about what to think, how to look up stuff, so it seems opaque. This is difficult to address while the very language is still in development itself.

I did have a wonderful result with using Windows dll calls to an experiment board driver, thanks to brilliant support from LC staff in this forum. But I imagine people who feel competent using LCS are very daunted by the feeling of being a total noob again.

[FourthWorld]

That was one of the thingsi enjoyed about Toolbook: with only one platform to support it was relatively straightforward for them to implement their FFI directly in the main scripting language.

[atmosk]

@Fourth
Didn't use lockscreens as the main thing that bothered me was the 6.7/6.5 disparity (which activated my spidey senses). I did test a bit with lockscreen yesterday too, but it was good that I didn't too much since that resulted in me fixing and improving the 2 tests.

The results of running again (all numbers are milliseconds)

data: https://pastebin.com/7p6kzLs9
the stack script (icons): https://pastebin.com/nkq83aed

This time I added a part to remove the duration of the repeats and other operations, which didn't add much, but more than nothing. Changed from ticks and seconds to just milliseconds since using the other 2 was ... weird. Also instead of arbitrary 120 graphics and 2000(*2) icon swaps, the final numbers are the calculated averages for a single operation.

For the lines/points swapping,
6.0.2 to 6.1.3 line's point swapping really was abysmal as it looked like before, there was also a massive improvement in 6.5 that was slightly negated in 6.6.2 to 8.1.7 (almost 4x slower) and >9.0 normal again.
Interestingly the benefits of locking the screen seem to have become consistently less than half as beneficial. Still the a difference between locking and not is notable (~20x improvement in 9.0.1), but at this rate in 2034, it will be pointless to use lock screen

As for the icons, the end result for not locked is what I had yesterday and with lockscreen the times were fairly stable across the versions. Difference being though is that prior to 6.5, icon swapping was almost as fast with or without lockscreen and there was no improvement to the time it took in newer versions, only the unlocked icon swap got slower making the benefits of lockscreen more apparent. Which I think is what caused tjframe's conclusion.


@Bogs,
The general impression I had gotten from reading these forums whenever I had a problem was that the standalone would run at mach 10 while the IDE strolls at walking speeds. Not the sub 1/6th benefit from my tests.


@LCB,
It's great if all you use is LiveCode, but if you already use dozen other languages each with a dozen other libraries and frameworks then decrypting LCB to a point of usability isn't quite worth it, yet. That's just me though.

[bogs]

@Bogs,
The general impression I had gotten from reading these forums whenever I had a problem was that the standalone would run at mach 10 while the IDE strolls at walking speeds. Not the sub 1/6th benefit from my tests.

Gotcha

[sphere]

i also have 2 cents:

cent 1: LC902 was so s-l-o-w this weekend, i don't know why. Had to wait a few seconds before a button reacted. Then i quit it, restart end then runs faster. Nothing else in particular run at the same time, the CPU cycle was not high, but it was so s-l-o-w like a 286.

cent 2: i have some ideas i would like to do using LCB, but...if i have a dll or something or an API, a library from another language, i would not know how to use that or know how to bind one to another. I did the lessons on LCB creating a simple Hello world. But how do you know from the DLL where to bind too. OR maybe i just don't understand how it actually works.

[trevordevore]

@sphere - The guide that has example binding strings is the LiveCode Builder Language Reference. Here is the url in the Github repo:

https://github.com/livecode/livecode/bl ... ference.md

Here is a project that wraps the winSparkle DLL on Windows. Hopefully seeing some working code will prove helpful.

https://github.com/trevordevore/lc-winsparkle

I've done some small experiments with wrapping the Windows APIs. While I haven't done much there may some code in the following repo that helps:

https://github.com/trevordevore/lc-windows-toolset

[AndyP]

There's an interesting thread here

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=31888

about slowness in Windows..points to problems with LC and some security products,

[sphere]

Thanks a lot Trevore, have some reading & learning to do.

Thanks Andy, will try some tonight with Windows Defender.