schiff@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Michael Schiff) (11/08/90)
Is it my imagination, or is Hypercard 2.0 noticeably slower than its predecessor? I realize it may be doing more than 1.2.x, but after playing with 2.0 for a few days, I'm a little disturbed. On my SE, even cycling through cards with an arrow button seems significantly slower. I thought I had heard that 2.0 had some sort of on-the-fly script compilation feature that would speed things up. Was that also my imagination? Other than this speed issue, 2.0 does seem to be a much superior product. Mike
a347@mindlink.UUCP (John Miller) (11/08/90)
In article <SCHIFF.90Nov7103041@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU> Michael Schiff writes > Is it my imagination, or is Hypercard 2.0 noticeably slower than its > predecessor? I realize it may be doing more than 1.2.x, but after > playing with 2.0 for a few days, I'm a little disturbed. On my SE, > even cycling through cards with an arrow button seems significantly > slower. > > I thought I had heard that 2.0 had some sort of on-the-fly script > compilation feature that would speed things up. Was that also > my imagination? The script compilation speeds up HyperTalk execution, but this does not have an effect on HyperCard primitives. HyperCard 2.0 is slower in several areas. Some of this, no doubt, is because it has to handle more general cases (things like different card sizes) and because it is uses TextEdit (souped-up in places) for fields. For some cases, I suspect performance will improve in later versions as the HyperCard team tunes the code. For me, the big disappointment was the speed at which HyperCard would move from field to field when the user pressed the Tab keys. The problem gets worse as the number of fields increase or the card size grows. For instance, for a card size of 512 x 664 with 30 fields, it was taking about 50-55 ticks to tab from field to field -- even when tabbing between fields that were each only a single text line high. These times are for a Mac IIx. On an SE or Plus -- the target machine for this stack -- it means waiting a few seconds each time the user presses Tab. Definitely unfeasible. Given that HyperCard seems to be used a lot for various "front ends", this must be a problem for a lot of stacks. Fortunately, for the Tabbing case, I was able to write a generic FastTab XCMD which fools HyperCard enough to reduce the tabbing time to around 9-10 ticks for the above stack. So now the stack is back in the realm of feasibility. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Miller (604) 433-1795 Symplex Systems AppleLink (rarely) CDA0461 Burnaby, British Columbia Fax: (604) 430-8516 Canada usenet: john_miller@mindlink.uucp ----------------------------------------------------------------------