[Gambas-user] VB6 to Gambas Global arrays

[Rob Kudla]

On Mon July 17 2006 13:13, R A Turney wrote:
> an Intel Xeon 1.8 Ghz.  On my "converted to Gambas" version
> running on my home computer, AMD Athlon XP 2000+, and SuSE
> 9.3, it takes roughly ten seconds.  That's why I assumed it
> was interpreted code.  I am hoping that after my direct

Don't be misled.... while Gambas may have a compiler, it's still 
an interpreted language.  The Gambas compiler creates its own 
flavor of pseudo-code, not actual machine code, and the archiver 
just takes those p-code object files and jams them together into 
an "executable" that really runs as a script (head -1 
myproject.gambas should give you "#!/usr/bin/gbx2" or something 
like that, instead of a bunch of binary ELF gibberish as you'd 
find in a Linux machine code program.)

For most of what Gambas is meant to do, this is fine, but yeah, 
it might be at a disadvantage against VB for straight-up math.  
(I have VB running under VMware on one of my workstations; maybe 
I'll set up a Linux VMware session to benchmark them fairly.)

Maybe it would be possible to write a Gambas component to let you 
write strictly mathematical expressions and execute them using 
libm or something.  I wouldn't know if that would actually work 
or how to do it, though.

I hope that someday someone will either write a Gambas bytecode 
to machine code crosscompiler, or add the ability to generate 
machine code in the Gambas compiler.  This is way beyond my 
ability and more than most people want or need from Gambas, so 
I'm not holding my breath.

Rob