Post by gcanyon in Lil Programming Questions

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Interesting -- I'm not terribly familiar with list generation: I've played with Python, so I know it's a thing, but LiveCode has nothing like it built in, and I would never do something like

repeat with i = 1 to 1000000
    put i,"" after aList
end repeat
repeat for each item i in aList
    -- do something
end repeat

I just checked and found that the while loop was even slower :-)

I'm not sure this accomplishes the same task, albeit that the task is synthetic in the first place, but in any case, this is about 20x faster:

on click do
range 10000000
 alert["Done!"]
end

Internet Janitor3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Oh, there's one other thing I should note that's probably making us talk past one another somewhat: Lil in Decker is deliberately capped at a specific number of "ops" (VM bytecode steps) per "frame" (display updates at 60fps) . This is an arbitrary creative constraint intended to help decks behave more consistently across different machines with wildly different levels of performance. The "FRAME_QUOTA" constant in the JavaScript implementation controls this cutoff.

gcanyon3 years ago

Oh, HA! Okay, that makes sense. "constant in the JavaScript implementation" -- meaning updating it requires rebuilding Decker from source? Or is it configurable?

Internet Janitor3 years ago

You can rebuild from source, or, in a web build, just open the file in your favorite text editor, search for "FRAME_QUOTA", and tweak as desired. I may raise the limit and/or make it configurable at runtime in the future.

Kistaro339 days ago

Is there an API to check “fraction of script steps remaining this frame” from inside a Lil script? (For operations with shorter limits, like accessing a property on a Contraption, is there one that checks the operation limit?)

I’m consider9ing Decker to write a loosely-chess-inspired roguelike, and I’d want to use this to know when to stop searching for a move on the current frame and advance a “thinking” animation so the deck does not act frozen during the opponent’s turn.

Internet Janitor339 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

There is not presently a way to inspect the remaining per-frame quota (or other limits) from within executing scripts.

As a developer you can get a rough idea of how close your scripts are to quota by enabling the "Script Profiler" feature from within the Decker menu. This will display a live chart of the percentage of quota scripts have consumed over the past few seconds.

If you want to provide the user with visual feedback during long-running scripts, you need only draw visible updates from time to time. When a script runs out of quota it is simply paused momentarily to allow Decker to service input and then automatically resumed, unless the user explicitly halts it.

OXTPaul2 years ago (1 edit)

LiveCode script (and the GPLv3 community fork OpenXTalk) has arrays which can be considerably faster then using comma-seperated-values for text container 'lists' (but when I do I use tab as a delimiter).
Also LC / OXT has a second language, the Extension Builder lang for making 'Widgets' and wrapping external code libraries, which does have an actual List type where the ordered elements can be of any type, Text, Numbers, JSON, Java, or C and ObjC types, Pointers, etc.

itch.io

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