On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 1:16 AM, Jeffrey Massung <mass...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Coroutines have absolutely no advantage over what's already provided by LC. > There's zero difference between saying "yield()" and "wait 0 ticks with > messages". > I realized that, apart from the fact that this isn't true, it's also kind of my point: from a developer standpoint, coroutines work fairly similarly to what many already do when they want to have two or three things going at once. Hence they would be a significant improvement (because they maintain state automatically) with very little effort required on the part of livecode developers. > > The purpose of mutli-threading is to take advantage of one or more of the > following: a completely separate hardware thread (program/code runs 100% in > parallel with another program/set of code - the only bottlenecks being > memory and I/O) or preemptive threading, typically by way of hyper-threading > on a single hardware thread (basically letting the hardware or OS decide > when to context switch for you). > This is true, but it's not a fair description of the current limitations of livecode. Currently it is very difficult simply to program any sort of background task whatsoever: processing a log file, making aliens attack, etc. "wait 0 ticks" simply isn't a good answer for those sorts of issues. Ask Malte what he could do for animationEngine (and how much more simply) with coroutines. Yes, threads are filled with awesome powah, but they're also a lot of work to get right, and filled with pitfalls. Coroutines, by comparison, are easy, and would make a lot of things easy to do that are currently hard or impossible. One other thing, just in case -- anyone who thinks threads will make livecode a powerhouse for developing videogames is mistaken. That would require an overhaul of the graphics engine. You can devote 100% of livecode's attention to moving stuff around on the screen and come up short on performance by a couple orders of magnitude. I don't say that to criticize livecode, it's just that graphics performance isn't their focus, never has been, and doesn't seem as though it will be any time soon. Flight Control is well within livecode's capabilities now. Angry Birds might be a stretch. Fruit Ninja would be a real achievement, and forget about Real Racing. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Ooo -- I just had an idea for a flight-control-like game. Guess I need to get that iOS license after all... gc _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
