OpenEuphoria

Re: v2.5 Opens exw files wayyyy too slow

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Dec 21, 2004
• 559 views

Patrick Barnes wrote:
> 
> Yes, perhaps something similar to C's .o files would be good.
> That is, large libraries can be made in an intermediate IL-like form,
> so that it's *much* quicker to load them into the program.
> When you run a program with the interpreter the first time, it
> generates .o files for each library you include, and starts the
> program. The next time it's run, it sees that the .o files already
> exist (and they're up-to-date) so it just reads in the .o files and
> runs.
> 
> It'd certainly make things a lot quicker. I know it doesn't sound as
> simple, but the extra step wouldn't affect programmers adversely,
> because the interpreter would do everything.
> 
> Think of it as 'caching'.

I'm not going to make things more complicated.

1. If you have a decent machine (less than 3 years old), 
   you can probably parse 100,000 lines in 3 seconds.
   99% of programs are much smaller than that.
   Maybe your scheme would cut that to 1 second.
   Judith's IDE, for example, then takes 3 more seconds 
   executing code to initialize itself (nothing to do with parsing).

2. 2.5 beta parses significantly faster than 2.5 alpha in all cases. 
   It's dramatically faster on old machines with small memories 
  (64 MB or less) when very large programs are parsed.

3. Old, slow machines are disappearing every day, being replaced
   by > 2GHz machines. Already, most people have little concern about
   parse speed. In a couple of years no one will care about this.
   Why build a major new mechanism that has little use now, and 
   will be completely useless in a couple of years? 
   It will be one more thing to confuse beginners.

4. If you translate, your app will start with zero parse time.
   If you bind, your app will also now start with zero parse time (in 2.5).

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com