OpenEuphoria

Re: Suggestions and Stuff

• Posted by "Cuny, David" <David.Cuny at DSS.CA.GOV> Mar 31, 1999
• 498 views

C. K. Lester wrote:

> I mean, it's not like I need any software optimization on
> my PII-450, 128MB RAM, and with the P-III and faster machines
> coming available, will it really matter if we use strings or integers?

I wondered about that before I posted this. In my code, *all* classes share
the same methods, even if they don't choose to implement them. I figured
that memory is cheap. In Quartz, it's less of a problem, since the search
space for methods is fairly small.

My suspicion is that the cost is probably not as high as I think it is. The
real expense in the classes is probably in the calls to routine_id, which
has to place all the values into a new sequence before making the call. This
gets even more expensive if the OOP supports inheritance, since a call to a
class results into a call to it's base class, and so on.

> I like the object.method way myself, but I'm flexible and
> open to whatever works and works well. 

I don't think that Robert will be adopting that syntax in the near future. I
think it would be a nice feature, but there are probably a lot of
far-reaching ramifications, like having to wait until run time to resolve
names.

> P.S. I think we should start a David Cuny Win32Lib Fund or something.

Thanks, but money isn't the problem - it's time and burnout. I used to have
a lot more time, until kid #2 came along. Unlike his brother, he runs at
full throttle all day long. So I seem to have a lot less time and energy
than I did before. Plus, projects like Win32Lib are never ending - there's
always a new feature to implement, or a bug to fix.

That's why I'm rewriting WinLib from the ground up - the next version should
allow extending the core merely by adding self-contained include files. That
gets the bulk of the work off my shoulders, and onto people who are
rightfully itching for new features.

Work is moving slowly in the right direction - the core WinLib code looks
more and more like WinMan. It's a lot of "one step forward, two steps back"
kind of thing - it's difficult to disentangle a lot of Win32 dependancies
and make the classes clean. I won't promise any delivery dates, but as soon
as I get two basic classes up (a window and a pushbutton) I'll be posting
the code for feedback.

-- David Cuny