Dr. Hawkins wrote:
After many recent posts, I'm starting to wonder: what does and
doesn't get complied in a standalone?
Several messages have suggested, if I'm reading them write, that the
main stack is compiled, while the others, even if password protected,
are interpreted at runtime. Am I getting that right?
And if so, what is the performance hit?
So should all of the more intensive work be moved into routines in the
main stack?
No difference between mainstack made into an app and any other stack
files used for code. And AFAIK no difference in execution speed between
password-protected and non-protected scripts, though I haven't measured
it in many years.
In the modern world with so many different types of compilers,
determining exactly what "compile" means can be tricky.
My understanding of what LiveCode does is that it uses a two-pass
compilation method, similar to many other high-level languages, in which
a script is tokenized into a highly efficient bytecode format at runtime
as objects are unpacked, and that bytecode is then run through the
engine during execution.
Exceptions to this include "do", "send", "call", and "dispatch", which
must be tokenized on the fly since they're effectively working with
dynamic strings, which explains why those run so much slower than
alternatives.
If anyone has more details beyond this I'd love to hear them.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys
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