Re: speed of text applications...

[uerics@mcl.ucsb.edu (Eric D. Shepherd)]

Re: Text speed

NiftyList uses custom text I/O routines.  That's a pretty standard route
for people with a real nose for (a) perfection and (b) speed.  I'm not a
speed junkie, but I do generally prefer to write my own I/O routines when
I do text apps., just because going through tool and OS vectors is slow.

A friend of mine has nearly perfected the art of quick text drawing on the
text screen.  He once called me in a panic because he'd just discovered he
was wasting _one_ cycle for each character output to the screen. :)

I used to use the Text Tools for my stuff, but they were so slow I wrote a
library of text I/O routines (very general purpose, but fairly speedy),
which would do simple windowing, and included code for highlighted bar
menus and such.  These routines take some time to do, but once you've
written such things, they can be used again and again. :)

That was an overly technical reply.  Sorry...

Oh, yes... GNO uses its own text I/O routines, but they're routed through
the GS/OS Console Driver and Text Tools.

- Eric S.

--
Eric D. Shepherd                   | Apple II Alliance Charter Member
InterNet: uerics@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu  |           ACM Member
FidoNet:  1:206/2713 Eric Shepherd | Programming Law #1: "When in
AOL:      Sheppy                   | doubt, rewrite from scratch."