1. Re: Euphoria vs. Visual Basic - the speed
On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, [iso-8859-2] =A9koda wrote:
> How much faster, if at all, is Euphoria compared to Visual Basic 6.0?
I have Visual Basic 4.0 (32-bit) and I think Euphoria is usually faster,
though I don't (yet) have the benchmarks to proove it. I could port some
of the benchmarks and post the results, if you like.
> Why should I use Euphoria and not Visual Basic?
Well, Visual Basic is good for some things... specifically building GUI
applications fast. As you point out, Euphoria doesn't have a good IDE
while Visual Basic has one of the best. Then again, VB costs a heck of a
lot more than Euphoria, and isn't available for Linux or DOS. It's also
not as good as Euphoria for building simple, non-GUI programs fast.
> Cause I think I'm gonna switch to Visual Basic if I don't get a good re=
ason why not to.
> How is graphics and game development supported with Visual Basic?
I think for graphics and game development, you might find that Euphoria i=
s
a lot better. With Euphoria, you can easily bitblit images onto windows
etc. With VB, it's a little more complex since you don't have such direct
access to low-level stuff.
> What bothers me about euphoria:
>
> a.. It doesn't have a good IDE with good debugging. It has trace, bu=
t it's very poor. For example, you can see only sequences that are small,=
if I have string "C:\Euphoria\DEMO\DOS32\STEREO.EX" I can only see "C:\E=
uphoria\D...", there's no way I can see the whole string.You should also =
be able to view nested sequences in a treeview.
> a.. It doesn't support structures.
> a.. It's not flexible enough (default argumens, atom a=3D2,...)
Those three I agree with, but I think can be remedied. I'm working (slowl=
y
but surely) on a pre-processor, and hopefully I'll have support for
structures and default arguments soon. Assignments at declarations
shouldn't be too difficult either. As for an IDE, maybe I'll work on one
later... but right now I'm developing mainly on Linux and it's been a lon=
g
time since I've used win32lib. I was a bit annoyed by the trace
facilities in Euphoria as well, so one of the things EPP (my preprocessor=
)
was supposed to do when I first started thinking about it was also
interpret Euphoria programs and provide a much more advanced trace.
> a.. I don't know if sequences are such a good thing. They cause a lot=
of trouble and code gets messy if they get too complex. I think you can =
work normally with simple 1 dimensional arrays and structures.
I agree with this argument too. For some things, sequences are awesome...
but data quickly gets unstructured and the code can get really ugly.
However, they are frequently extremely useful and if you're careful, you
can keep your code pretty clean. I suggest abstracting the sequences...
for example, I wrote an include file for trees. Instead of storing each
tree in a separate sequence, I kept all the nodes in one sequence and had
each point to its parent and its children. Then all the routines acted
upon a tree_node object (which is really just an integer index into the
internal sequence), and I tested that separately. Then when I put it into
the rest of my program, it was quite easy because I didn't have to worry
about the details of the tree, not to mention modular code is good... and
my include file might be useful some other time.
Jeff Fielding
