We can continue in the Games list, but I am interested in the Multimedia
issues some of you have encountered and your experiences with RB in
those situations.
Games also push the envelope when it comes to Software and Hardware so
they have many things in common hence the reason why I asked the
question here under games.
But have no problem moving this to the games lists.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Jan 25, 2007, at 20:11 UTC, Giovanni wrote:
1- Is the penalty due to lack of optimized Compiler?
No. In fact the compiler does do some optimizations, just not as many
(apparently) as they would like. But in real apps, I don't think this
is the chief bottleneck.
2- Is the penalty due to lack of optimized classes or framework?
Certainly not; these are highly optimized in most cases already.
(Though there may still be specific bits of it that could be better
optimized, I'm sure.)
No, when there is any performance penalty in RB vs. comparable code in
C/C++, it really comes from things RB is doing for you, and not from
either of the factors you mention above. For example, RB checks array
bounds instead of letting you wander off into random memory; it checks
the stack instead of letting your app just crash (and on some systems,
crash the OS as well); it yields time to other threads automatically at
loop boundaries; it does reference-counting so you don't have to worry
so much about who owns every bit of memory. The reference-counting, in
particular, tends to be pretty expensive in small, tight loops that
access any objects. Method calls are rather expensive too.
Now, some of these could be optimized away in certain cases, and it's
probably exactly those optimizations that the guys at RS were thinking
about when they said they wanted the compiler to do more. But these
will be mostly nonstandard optimizations, not the sort a C compiler
would do for you anyway. If you were to write your C/C++ code to do
all the same things that RB is doing for you, it'd likely be no faster.
All that stuff takes work, and the special cases where the work can
safely be avoided require a pretty smart (and specialized) optimizer to
detect.
But note that much of this stuff can be turned off via pragmas, and
game developers are generally used to making good use of those where
they can make a difference. Let's continue this on the games list if
you want to get into detail on that.
Our current approach is to develop the UI in RB and some limited
functions and classes but have all of our code that we need to
control performance as a Plugin.
You certainly can do that, but I've never yet seen it necessary.
Is this the approach some of you are doing?
Not me -- my games are 100% RB, except for a few functions where I use
some plugins (mostly from Frank!). But those aren't for performance,
but rather for functionality which is still awkward to get in pure RB
code, like manipulating monitor resolution.
Best,
- Joe
--
Joe Strout -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Verified Express, LLC "Making the Internet a Better Place"
http://www.verex.com/
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