"I've been trying to make up my mind about switching...for a
> particular project that involves a mammoth amount of text processing." ... > It processes millions of characters of text and displays results > by way of nearly 400 fields using every square inch of a cinema > display, graphs, and other cute interface elements.
> coaxed to go a bit faster than I'm able to make it.
...so I'm trying to figure out...whether Revolution can't be
Gotcha. Thanks for the background.
If you're willing to trade the productivity benefits of typeless languages for raw speed (see <http://dev.scriptics.com/doc/scripting.html>), you might find it worthwhile to just go with the standard and use C++. There are a few good x-plat frameworks around so you can leverage your investment well.
But even if you enjoy lower-level languages you may find a more optimal mix using C++ for computationally-intensive tasks inside of a GUI built with ease in Rev. I see few multi-platform applications that could not improve their ROI with that mix, esp. given the hooks available with the Embedded Engine option.
Before I could make any specific recommendation I would need to understand why the UI has 400 fields on it. To someone unfamiliar with the project it sounds like information overload for the user, and the display time for such a UI may be a bigger bottleneck than focusing on text processing alone.
And as David Vaughan suggested, learning specifics about the data set itself may yield optimal algorithms which can give you very good performance while leveraging your extensive experience with xTalk.
My WebMerge product is all about text processing, parsing database content of 50,000 records or more and generating static HTML pages from them. I haven't really begun optimizing it (I have a new code base in development that will likely double its speed), yet it's fully-native Transcript code base gets strong reviews for many things including speed, as you can read at <http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/gallery.html>.
With a little knowledge of what your data looks like and how it's used I'm confident that good performance levels can be reached with Rev, and with a nearly unbeatable ROI that takes all development and maintenance issues into account.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
