On 2015-10-24 22:55, JB wrote:
If you do get Open Language what will it do to the speed? They said LC8 would be good because it will make it easier for developers to write code in LC which needed to be and external before.
We're still working on the 'foreign function interface' in LCB, so it is not yet as mature as we would like. The benefits of doing it from LCB rather than in C is that you don't have to deal with C compilers, toolchains and IDEs. (This is particularly pertinent if you are wanting to wrap an existing library which you don't have to compile yourself!).
Then after releasing it they said it is slower to use than a external written in C.
Given that most OS APIs do quite heavyweight things execution speed is not really a concern. After all, if you are asking the OS 'please render this PDF page here', then it matters not one iota what the cost of abstraction is to call that OS supplied rendering function - it will always be orders of magnitude less than rasterizing millions of pixels.
In most cases, I think you'll generally find that speed of writing code for these kind of things is much more important than the speed of the bit which marshals things appropriately to call the API.
Now, that is not to say that speed of LiveCode Builder is not important to us - because it critically is. We are designing the language to try and ensure that it can be compiled and run at speeds which are not too dissimilar to native code in the future - this is why variables are typed, type conversions are more strict and handler calls are 'static' (not determined at runtime) rather than dynamic.
Indeed, the plan is that LiveCode Script (as it is now) and LiveCode Builder will eventually sit atop the *same* underlying bytecode-based VM so both can benefit from a native compilation strategy (probably based on LLVM). The *difference* is that the scope of optimization of LiveCode Script will be a great deal less than that for LiveCode Builder due to its dynamic design and use.
Mark. -- Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ LiveCode: Everyone can create apps _______________________________________________ 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
